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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



SIX FOOLS 



BY 

ROLLO FRANKLIN HURLBURT 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1916, by 
ROLLO FRANKLIN HURLBURT 




CI.A427405 



^/ 



TO MARY MY WIFE 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Foreword 7 

I. The Young Fool 13 

II. The Companion Fool 57 

III. The Woman Fool 105 

IV. The Rich Fool 153 

V. The King Fool 197 

VI. The No-God Fool 241 



FOREWORD 

Gruff, gloomy, pessimistic, dyspeptic 
Thomas Carlyle once described the pop- 
ulation of England as consisting of so 
many millions, who were mostly fools. 
Carlyle must have been suffering from 
one of his numerous attacks of indigestion 
when he gave vent to that savage utter- 
ance, or possibly one of his sleepless nights 
had somewhat disturbed his mental equi- 
librium. From whatever cause the ex- 
plosion came, his percentage is confessedly 
much too high for the number of fools 
in England's population or in that of 
any other civilized country. If we receive, 
however, the generally accepted definition 
for a fool, that he is a person deficient in 
judgment, who acts stupidly or absurdly, 
or pursues a course contrary to the dic- 
tates of wisdom, then we must admit 
that fools form a considerable number in 
the population of every civilized land. 
Something over a hundred times the word 

7 



8 FOREWORD 

"fool" is used in the Bible, and it is an 
exceedingly interesting study when we come 
to inquire into the root-meanings of the 
word. In the different contexts, where 
the various terms for the English word 
"fool" are found, it means, in the original, 
an evil person, a boaster, a self-confident 
one, an empty fellow, a contemptible indi- 
vidual, a villain, one who is thickheaded, 
thoughtless, unwise, heedless, or rebellious. 
So true are the Scriptures to universal 
human experience that whenever we read 
the references to fools in the Bible or 
come to study their several individual 
histories, their portrayal is so vivid and 
so true to human nature that we somehow 
feel the various writers must be describing 
flesh-and-blood existences in this twentieth 
century rather than men and women who 
lived thousands of years ago. We find 
that the modern kinds of fools are like the 
Bible types: boasters, bragging of their 
great exploits; wise in their own conceit, 
but superficial and vacuous; indifferent to 
life's greatest and best opportunities; im- 
prudent and rash, careless and improv- 



FOREWORD 9 

ident; wicked and base; and rebellious 
against the laws of God and man. In the 
chapters of this book the author has 
nothing to do with the professional fool, 
the jester or buffoon of the sixteenth 
century of English history. Such was a 
person of quick wit and ready repartee and a 
capital story-teller, appearing quite conspic- 
uously in Shakespeare's plays and dressed 
in fantastic garb of most gaudy colors. 
He wore upon his head a pointed cap 
trimmed with small bells, that tinkled as 
he walked. This fool was kept by persons of 
rank for the purpose of making sport and 
furnishing entertainment to while away the 
often tedious hours of court routine. He 
finds his modern counterpart in the circus 
clown of to-day. The writer does not 
treat of weak-minded or of idiotic people, 
nor of insane persons, all of whom are 
sometimes called fools. The Scriptures 
and the larger book of human life show 
that multitudes of people most finely en- 
dowed have turned to the ways of folly 
and have gone down to destruction. Some 
of the most clever people intellectually 



10 FOREWORD 

have, like Saul, "erred exceedingly and 
played the fool." The sad tragedy about 
it all is that those who, through their 
own willfulness and stubbornness, have re- 
fused to look at things in their true and 
right relations, have turned deaf ears to 
all counsels of wisdom, and have made 
evil choices, have at last come to them- 
selves only after the hardest and the most 
bitter lessons learned in the rough school 
of experience. Some see, after the years 
with all their golden opportunities have 
gone, how they might have succeeded only 
after success has been finally forfeited, 
and after their last chance to win has 
been forever swept away. The common 
apologetic and often smiling comment on 
recklessness in youthful character is that 
it is only a case of sowing wild oats. 
People frequently refer to the sowing of 
wild oats as lightly as they speak of measles 
as one of the unavoidable diseases of child- 
hood. But the young person, who indulges 
in that sort of seed-sowing is bound to reap 
sooner or later the harvest of the same kind 
of worthless tares and noxious weeds of 



FOREWORD 11 

wickedness. In many personal instances 
after a complete moral reform, it has been 
found that there still continue in the 
doomed physical body the undermining 
effects of even the few years that have been 
spent in sin. Many a constitution that 
has broken prematurely and many a death 
date on the tombstone that has antedated 
God's own good time belong in the harvest 
of wild oats. As to the kinds of fools that 
receive attention in this book, we discuss 
those who, refusing to grapple with the 
hard tasks that make manhood, compel 
classification with the invertebrates. An- 
other class considered are the obstinate, 
opinionated, and self -centered, who decline 
to accept the good counsels of those older 
and wiser than themselves, and who are 
rewarded according to their folly. Another 
group treated are those who trust to the 
attractions of external adornment rather 
than to the sterling worth of moral qualities, 
and who as a result come to inevitable 
degeneracy of character. Investigation is 
given to those who starve the soul to fatten 
the purse, who grow rich in the abundance 



U FOREWORD 

of the things which they possess, but be- 
come atrophied, inactive, and inert in the 
exercise of all the powers of the higher and 
better nature. A study is presented of those 
who pride themselves upon their great intel- 
lectual ability and force of will, who claim 
that for this reason they can give free rein 
to appetite and passion, who maintain that 
they will always continue to be their own 
masters in self-control, yet who make an 
utter wreck of life and character. Last of 
all a view is taken of those most shallow 
and empty of all who question or deny the 
existence of an Intelligent First Cause. It 
will be seen that the teaching in these pages 
comes not only from the direct study of 
the type of fool that is under considera- 
tion, but also from reference to contrasting 
characters of goodness, virtue, and ex- 
cellence. It is sought to make the folly 
of the fool all the more evident by 
considering also the wisdom of the wise. 



I 

THE YOUNG FOOL 



A fool always finds a greater fool to admire 
him. — Boileau. 

The fool is happy that he knows no more. — 
Pope. 

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend! 
More hideous than the sea-monster art thou, 
When thou showest thyself in a child! 
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
To have a thankless child! 

— Shakespeare, 



THE YOUNG FOOL 

The ten great laws, which furnish the 
foundation of all modern jurisprudence, 
were written originally on two tables of 
stone. Jewish tradition holds that upon 
the first table were engraven the first 
four commandments, that embody man's 
duties to his God, and that upon the 
second table were recorded the last six, 
that include the duties of man to man. 
It is uncertain whether the Decalogue was 
thus divided as to the two tables of stone, 
but it is evident that the Ten Command- 
ments fall naturally into these two logical 
divisions: duties to God and duties to man. 

Why should the commandment "Honor 
thy father and thy mother" have been 
given the first place among the duties of 
man to man, and thus seemingly empha- 
sized as the most important in the second 
division of the Decalogue.? All human 

15 



16 SIX FOOLS 

government began in the family. He who 
created us as moral beings made us to 
dwell together in mutual dependence. "God 
setteth the solitary in families." The 
germ of all authority lies in the relation 
of parent and child; in the care that the 
child calls forth, in the weakness of in- 
fancy, and in the natural parental and 
filial reverence that springs perennially 
from the human heart. 

Turning back toward the beginnings of 
history, we behold the patriarch Abraham 
dwelling in his tent with his children. 
We see this household expanding into 
tribes, yet still linked in a bond of brother- 
hood, and still honoring and reverencing 
the father of them all, who is their sheik, 
priest, and head. We discern in this house- 
hold the foundation of the Hebrew com- 
monwealth. History repeats that same 
early chapter in the beginnings of the 
Roman empire, and in the tribes of the 
Arabs of the desert to-day. 

One of the wisest of English jurists, in his 
work on ancient law, has said, "Society in 
primitive times was not a collection of 



THE YOUNG FOOL 17 

individuals; it was an aggregation of fam- 
ilies." The law of the household was thus 
supreme among all early peoples. Filial 
reverence was the foundation upon which 
was erected the superstructure of the state. 

The parental relation is the type of 
God's relation to us, and in the filial 
relation we find the type of our duties 
to God. Obedience is the foundation of 
all effective and righteous government. 
We here notice the close relationship be- 
tween the human and the divine, for 
obedience is especially urged as a duty 
in the family. What God is to us in the 
parental sense all should be to the children 
that bless the household. 

The family relation is the source of all 
order, the foundation of all government, 
the inspiration of all industry, the fountain 
of all thorough, permanent, and harmoni- 
ous development among men. The con- 
stitution of a state may be faulty; but 
if it is composed of well-regulated families, 
it will be well managed. A country's theory 
of political government may be of the 
best; but if its family relationships are 



18 SIX FOOLS 

not based upon the divine plan and order, 
it is never far removed from anarchy. 

The fifth commandment is intended to 
have a broader scope than simply the 
promise of a long life individually to the 
child that honors his parents. Some chil- 
dren who honor their parents die young. 
Yet virtuous living always tends to lon- 
gevity; and we believe that honoring father 
and mother will tend to lengthen the life 
of an individual child, both naturally and 
by the blessing of God. But the chief 
burden of the promise is long life to a 
nation in which children generally honor 
their parents. This is evident from the 
peculiar phraseology of the commandment: 
"Honor thy father and thy mother: that 
thy days may be long upon the land, 
which the Lord thy God giveth thee." 
The Israelites had been given the land 
that had been promised them, and, like 
them, other nations have had their lands 
assigned to them. "God hath made of 
one blood all nations of men to dwell on 
all the face of the earth, and hath deter- 
mined the bounds of their habitation." 



THE YOUNG FOOL 19 

This fair land in which we Hve hath been 
determined as the bounds of our habita- 
tion; and the length of time that we and 
our descendants shall dwell here as a 
flourishing people will depend largely upon 
the preservation of the family as one of 
the institutions of Christianity, upon our 
obedience to the commandment, "Honor 
thy father and thy mother." 

We learn from the history of civilization 
that no people who have adhered to the 
law of the family and of the household 
have ever degenerated or have been sub- 
dued so as to be lost, and that no nation 
which has loosened the holy restraints of 
the family circle has been for any con- 
siderable period of time vigorous and 
growing. 

China is the oldest nation on earth, 
embracing a fourth of its population. Is 
it not a wonderful coincidence that the 
Chinese, with a civilization more than 
three thousand years old, are more re- 
markable for the obedience and reverence 
shown to parents than for any other qual- 
ity of character.^ Chinese children honor 



20 SIX FOOLS 

their parents as long as they live, and 
through the rites and ceremonies of their 
ancestral worship they perpetuate a grate- 
ful religious remembrance of them after 
death. Is not this a plausible and a rea- 
sonable solution for the problem of the 
wonderful preservation of the Chinese civ- 
ilization for so many centuries? The prin- 
ciple contained in the fifth commandment 
was one of God's great truths long before 
it was given to the world in the Decalogue. 
Although the Chinese have given an 
unconscious obedience through the cen- 
turies to a truth that had not been revealed 
to them, yet their obedience has received 
its due reward. 

A proper regard for parental authority 
lies at the foundation of all continuity of 
national life, and this foundation is under- 
mined if parental authority is defied. 

This commandment presupposes in the 
parents themselves qualities of character 
that are in every way worthy of honor. 
The very command "Honor" involves the 
possession of high moral attributes in those 
who are to be honored. Paul in his letter 



THE YOUNG FOOL 21 

to the Ephesians emphasizes this thought 
where he says: "Children, obey your par- 
ents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor 
thy father and mother; which is the first 
commandment with promise." We can 
readily see that the principle here given 
applies with equal force to both classes 
involved in the statements. Parents can- 
not educate their children according to 
the highest standard of morality and not 
themselves be exemplary Christians. The 
child may give obedience in many things 
that are for his own good to parents who 
are not as upright as they should be, but 
he cannot honor his father and mother 
most highly unless they are inherently 
worthy of the esteem and reverence man- 
ifested. He cannot give to them the 
highest degree of honor and reverence 
unless his daily pathway is illumined by 
the radiance that comes from the noble 
manly and womanly qualities of their 
Christian character and from the environ- 
ment of a Christian home. No stronger 
feeling is to be found in the heart of a 
father and mother than the desire to be 



22 SIX FOOLS 

worthy of the honor and love of their 
children. Many a man who is himself the 
victim of some odious habit will plead 
most earnestly with his children to abstain 
from the same evil practice, and for the 
sake of his children he will be nerved to 
extraordinary efforts to conquer himself. 
Many a man has emancipated himself 
from the degrading habits of drunkenness 
in order to secure the respect of his chil- 
dren and to promote their welfare. Even 
should such a man not succeed in the 
struggle to break the chains of his thrall- 
dom, still it would be the duty of his 
children to honor him as their father. 
They should endeavor to rescue him from 
his habits of vice, and at the same time 
seek to withstand manfully the evil in- 
fluence of his bad example. If this duty 
be clearly taught in cases of real degrada- 
tion, how impious it is for a son or daughter 
to fail in respect for parents on account 
of their ignorance or poverty. 

Ancient story has preserved for us a 
beautiful tradition. When, thirty centuries 
ago, the city of Troy was sacked by the 



THE YOUNG FOOL 23 

triumphant Greeks, ^Eneas, spurning all 
the treasures of silver and gold and other 
valuables, that he might have taken with 
him, lifted upon his shoulders his aged 
father Anchises, whose wisdom and affec- 
tion constituted for him a priceless in- 
heritance, and bore him away to a place 
of safety, ^neas, by this act of filial 
love won the admiration of foes and 
friends. He well deserves the descriptive 
title of the "pious" ^neas which Virgil 
gives to him, and in his unceasing devo- 
tion to his father he is a noble example 
of filial affection for the young men of 
our day. 

What a remarkably vivid picture of 
filial gratitude and ingratitude is that 
drawn by Shakespeare in his tragedy of 
King Lear. The poor old king is deposed 
from his throne and is driven forth with- 
out a crown and without a kingdom. He 
is scorned and scoffed at by his inhuman 
daughters, Goneril and Regan, who at last 
turn him out of doors into the darkness 
of a stormy night. The very elements 
seem to have conspired against him, and 



24 SIX FOOLS 

he regards the beating of the storm as in 
league with his unnatural daughters. But 
his Cordelia, even after he had deeply 
wronged her, is still most faithful to him. 
Cordelia, who is the most beautiful cre- 
ation of filial devotion that Shakespeare 
has presented in his works, is ever tender, 
true, and steadfast. 

Some parents of wealth develop their 
children in flabbiness and uselessness by 
removing them from contact with all diffi- 
culties. Kept busy with the playthings of 
a continuous kindergarten, they remain 
infants in character as long as they live. 
Having nothing of the arduous toil that 
makes strength of purpose, naught of the 
intense struggle that makes the mental 
and moral fiber of giants, and none of 
those mighty barriers to overcome that 
make heroes in life's conflict, they develop 
into dudes instead of men. 

A rich boy born in a mansion, wdth a 
multimillionaire father, is cared for by a 
French nurse. He is rocked to sleep upon 
pillows of eider down and is dandled in 
the lap of luxury. He is fitted for college 



THE YOUNG FOOL 25 

by a private tutor, and never learns in 
early life what it is to measure his own 
mental and physical strength with other 
boys of the same age. He is then sent 
to some one of the big Eastern universities 
and is bolstered up by paid tutors, who 
for so much an hour cram him for his 
periodical examinations all through his col- 
lege course of study. He then travels 
abroad for a while, and comes back home 
labeled as ''finished." He has been learn- 
ing up to this time as his chief occupation 
in life how to kill time most agreeably to 
himself. What do you have as a result 
of all this petting and propping up.'^ You 
have a great big overgrown baby — that 
is all. Suppose this rich young man's 
father fails suddenly, loses all his money, 
and his precious dude of a son is com- 
pelled to shift for himself. Then put him 
by the side of another young man of the 
same age, who has learned his costly les- 
sons in the hard school of adversity, and 
he will be left so far in the rear that he 
will be pronounced as distanced in almost 
the first mile of the race, 



26 SIX FOOLS 

Thomas Carlyle, in his Sartor Resartus, 
devotes an entire chapter to what he calls 
"The Dandiacal Man." The EngUsh dandy 
is what is known among us as the Amer- 
ican dude. Mr. Carlyle settled down to 
a scientific study of this character, and 
this is his definition: "A dandy is a clothes- 
wearing man, a man whose trade, office, 
and existence consist in the wearing of 
clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, 
purse, and person is heroically consecrated 
to this one object, the wearing of clothes 
wisely and well: so that as others dress 
to live, he lives to dress." 

The dude never seems to have learned 
that success in life is something more than 
playing substitute for the wooden dummy 
used by merchants on which to display 
their latest suits. The contents of the 
head are more important than the cost of 
the hat. Truth is of more consequence 
than the style of trousers. Quality of 
character is better than "quality clothes." 
A man's salvation does not depend upon 
the make of his shoes. There is a wide 
remove between the young man, of com- 



THE YOUNG FOOL 27 

mendable good taste, who dresses neatly 
and attractively, without making dress the 
chief aim of life, and the young man 
whose decalogue, creed, and confession of 
faith all relate to the wearing of clothes. 
People of good common sense are quick 
to discern the difference between the man 
who lives to dress and the man who dresses 
to live. The dude is so occupied with 
the outer husk of things that he gives no 
thought to the inner substance. He has 
a contempt for all kinds of hard work, and 
looks down With disdain upon all those 
who are obliged to earn their living by 
the sweat of their brow and the labor of 
their hands. 

Shall we call the dude a man.^^ We may 
be compelled to acknowledge that he be- 
longs to the human species. But as we 
have looked upon him and his class we 
have thought with Shakespeare's Hamlet: 

Some of Nature's journeymen had made men, 

and not made them well, 
They imitated humanity so abominably. 

The leisure class is rapidly increasing in 



28 SIX FOOLS 

our land. We sometimes feel compelled to 
ask, "Are we in the next generation to have 
a race of dudes rather than a race of men?" 
Oliver Goldsmith never uttered a greater 
truth than when he said, 

111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates and men decay. 

God's method of planning and working 
for us should be our method of planning 
and working for our children. A far older 
law than any in Adam Smith's Wealth of 
Nations makes it mandatory upon every 
man, whose brawn or brain can add any- 
thing whatever to productive industry, to 
contribute to the values of the world 
according to his ability. It is every man's 
duty to do this independently of the ques- 
tion whether his circumstances compel him 
to do so or not. Having parents, who 
are able and foolishly willing to supply 
fully all of a young man's wants does 
not excuse him from the obligation of 
earning his own li^dng. Willingness to be 
thus supported by his parents beyond the 
age when he is able to care for himself 



THE YOUNG FOOL 29 

will eliminate the manliness and obliterate 
the self-respect from the soul of any young 
man who degrades himself by becoming an 
inert and passive recipient. Parents can- 
not make any greater mistake than to 
support a son in trifling indolence. That 
father and mother who are held back from 
compelling a son to go out in the world 
and make his own living are dominated 
by a weak and false sentiment. Neither 
legacy nor inheritance brings the higher 
values to the soul's possessions; they must 
be paid for in the coin of self-denial and 
self-sacrifice. The child of the wisest man 
cannot receive his knowledge from his 
father as a heritage; he must toil to acquire 
his alphabet, spelling, reading, and multi- 
plication table by the side of the offspring 
of the most ignorant. His mind must be 
gradually trained to larger tasks just as 
the father's intellect has been slowly dis- 
ciplined to meet successfully, and to solve, 
great problems. His growth into the in- 
tellectual power of the parent is con- 
ditioned upon a like intensity of mental 
application. The most eminent saints can- 



80 SIX FOOLS 

not give to their children the graces that 
they have acquired only by the stress of 
toil and conflict. The child to gain them 
must pass over the same rough road of 
arduous labor and strenuous struggle. Ja- 
cob's character reached its richest maturity 
only after he had gone through the darkest 
agonies of trouble and heart-breaking sor- 
row. Joseph's wise statesmanship and 
lofty benevolence came as the direct fruit 
of the bitter persecution of his own brothers 
and his confinement in an Egyptian dun- 
geon. The Pauline character is the fruit 
of the successful struggle with a Pauline 
environment. In character-building God 
always stands ready to give brass for 
iron, silver for brass, and gold for silver. 
When God wanted a man to lead the 
chosen people out of their bondage, he 
might have bestowed at once upon the 
one whom he selected every gift and 
qualification that were needed for the 
large task. But instead he chose the man 
and then put him through eighty years of 
training and discipline before he placed 
upon his shoulders the responsibility of 



THE YOUNG FOOL 81 

the great work. Moses must esteem the 
reproach of Christ as greater riches than 
the treasures of Egypt. He must be will- 
ing to suffer affliction with the people of 
God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of 
sin for a season. Giving up the ancestral 
palace of the Pharaohs for a home in the 
desert wastes, and leaving the association 
of princes and kings, he must keep com- 
pany with sheep in the wilds of Arabia. 
But under the divine alchemy his silver 
was transformed into gold. How small and 
worthless were the things that Moses re- 
linquished when compared with the infinite 
values that he received in return! He 
gave up dependence upon goats and sheep 
and camels for the riches of an abiding 
faith in the living God. He surrendered 
all his rights as an adopted son of the 
Pharaohs, that his name might become 
embalmed in history for all time. He 
yielded up the brief companionship of 
earthly kings that he might receive the 
tables of stone from the Omnipotent God 
and share with Christ in the glories of the 
Mount of Transfiguration. He forsook the 



32 SIX FOOLS 

transient attractions that were within his 
grasp that he might have the everlasting 
company of the King of kings. He re- 
nounced the heirship to the throne of 
Egypt that he might become the leader 
and deliverer of God's chosen people, the 
originator of a new era of government, 
the source through whom there should 
come to the world its best and wisest 
laws, and the author of some of the most 
illustrious books in all literature. He 
abandoned all his claims to a petty king- 
dom that he might become preeminent 
among the great statesmen of all time. 
Difficulties are the invitations that come to 
us to amount to something. If it were in 
accordance with the divine purpose to de- 
velop us in limpness and feebleness, then 
these obstructions would all be taken away 
from us. Then there would be no obstacles 
to surmount, no enemies to fight, no 
troubles or trials to distress in life. But 
because manhood and character are to be 
won we are to face these hindrances that 
lie before us; we are to take hold of them 
and conquer them. 



THE YOUNG FOOL 33 

The Almighty Father wants all the 
power that we have; so he is interesting 
himself in the development of all the 
mental and moral strength that we possess. 
All the rugged mountains that we have to 
climb, all the surging rivers that we are 
called upon to cross, all the foes without 
and the foes within that we are called 
upon to face everywhere, mean develop- 
ment. They are all in the divine plan for 
the perfecting of human character. 

Why all the heartache, why all the ardu- 
ous toil? Why was not every truth made 
self-evident to begin with? Why has the 
human race been pushed on through all 
its long and agonizing struggle for the 
truth through all these thousands of years? 
Why were not this truth, that truth, and 
the other truth all written out in plain 
and easy script, and then put here and 
there in little boxes and all plainly labeled, 
so that all we would be obliged to do 
would be to go to the proper box and find 
the truth waiting for us, and get it in all 
its simplicity, without any effort upon our 
part? This is Lessing's answer: "Did the 



34 SIX FOOLS 

Almighty, holding in his right hand Truth, 
and in his left Search after Truth, deign 
to proffer me but one, I should request 
Search after Truth." 

God saw the possibilities of development 
in the human race, and so, instead of 
leaving us in our intellectual and moral 
babyhood, he planned for our growth into 
the largest moral and intellectual power. 
We are given this opportunity to search 
after the truth, and to struggle for it, in 
order that we may grow up in all the 
graces of a strong and stalwart character. 
We are made strong for holding the truth, 
after we get it, by climbing after it and 
struggling to reach it. All those who 
shrink from the weariness that goes with 
the intense effort, who do not agonize for 
the possession of the truth, never will be 
able to hold it after they get it. The 
truth is not true enough to them to stay 
with them, and they themselves are not 
true enough to the truth lovingly and 
desperately to attach their lives to it. 

We find, in the lazy view of life that 
prevails in some places, that some people 



THE YOUNG FOOL 35 

at times get to wondering why man, when 
he first appeared upon this earth, did not 
find already here steamboats upon the 
lakes and the rivers and in our ocean har- 
bors. Why did he not find railroads and 
telegraph and telephone lines, and the great 
engines of fire and steam, ready to carry 
his enterprises to the ends of the earth? 
They wonder why there should have been 
so many long years of waiting for the 
printing press, why there should have been 
such a vast amount of weary blundering 
as that which preceded the invention of 
the telephone and the phonograph. Why 
could not Adam have found the telephone 
ready for his use in the Garden of Eden? 
Man's great work is not the manufacture 
of steamboats, of railroads, of telegraph and 
telephone lines, of printing presses and of 
phonographs. Man's great work is the 
development of human character; and he 
has been led to make steamboats and 
railroads, to build telegraph and telephone 
lines, to invent printing presses and phono- 
graphs and aeroplanes, not only that he 
may develop commerce and civilization. 



36 SIX FOOLS 

but above all that he may develop him- 
self. Man has been brought up along 
these lines of material development in 
order that he may be led out into the 
larger places along the lines of spiritual 
development. A strong and matured char- 
acter comes from the development of these 
powers within us through the difficulties 
that we find around us. Life is a succession 
of battles, a continuous warfare. We have 
to fight with contending forces from the 
cradle to the grave. The questions are 
often asked: Why was life made so hard.^ 
Why should men be required to toil so 
terribly.^ Why should we be called upon 
continually to confront such mighty oppos- 
ing forces.^ It is this constant contest 
that is the very making of man, the very 
making of society. Without this ceaseless 
conflict we would become weak, puny, and 
powerless instead of strong, noble, and 
heroic. We would become the merest 
pygmies without the possibility of ever 
maturing into mental and moral giants. 
All the masterly inventions that now bless 
the world are but the fruits of this mighty 



I 



THE YOUNG FOOL 37 

struggle, the weapons that men have con- 
trived to help them in fighting the great 
battle of life. Much of our best literature 
is but the outcome of efforts made in this 
unending combat with the forces that op- 
pose. Many of our noblest poems are but 
the passionate expressions of truth that 
have been wrung from the human heart 
in the stress, the struggle, the agony of 
life's battles. Many of those who have 
done so much to teach and to inspire the 
world by their famous works, if they had 
been nursed in the lap of luxury, would 
have lived lives of inglorious ease and 
fruitless indolence. Deprive mankind to- 
day of all those products in inventions and 
in arts, in science, in philosophy, and in 
literature which we owe to that stern 
necessity which has compelled men to exer- 
cise their physical and intellectual powers 
to the utmost limit of endurance, and the 
world would be despoiled of its richest 
treasures. 

That masterpiece in English literature 
Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country 
Churchyard" contains a thought with 



38 SIX FOOLS 

which I do not agree, where the author 
speaks of "The short and simple annals 
of the poor." Much rather should he 
speak of the long and splendid annals of 
the poor. The families of the poor have 
opened their doors to our thought, and 
have given to art, to poetry, and to litera- 
ture, to discovery, to travel, to science, 
and to all reform the best and the noblest 
men and women that the world has ever 
known. Genius has often rocked her chil- 
dren in cradles of poverty, and the eye 
of the future has always been able to find 
the true leaders of mankind under thatched 
roofs and on beds of straw. 

Whatever may have been his early cir- 
cumstances, Paul, the Christian and the 
great apostle to the Gentiles, was poor 
and a tentmaker. Shakespeare was poor, 
and if he had been rich, he doubtless never 
would have given to the world his immortal 
plays. Ben Jonson worked with a trowel 
in his hand and a book in his pocket. 
Sir William Herschel, the eminent astron- 
omer; John Bunyan, the immortal dreamer; 
and Richard Cobden, the great English 



THE YOUNG FOOL 39 

statesman, were poor. Martin Luther, 
Patrick Henry, Henry Clay, Daniel Web- 
ster, Horace Greeley, Charlotte Cushman, 
Rosa Bonheur, Maria Mitchell, and Louisa 
M. Alcott all sprang from the ranks of 
the poor. Make out a list of the most 
prominent business men, the most noted 
lawyers, the most distinguished physicians, 
the most eminent preachers, the most con- 
spicuous statesmen in our land to-day, and 
then strike off from that list all those who 
began life as poor boys, obliged to make 
their own way, and they would outnumber 
the born aristocrats ten to one. 

Poverty is only another name for oppor- 
tunity, and it means to the person who 
has in him the stuff out of which men are 
made the opportunity to pluck victory out 
of defeat; the chance, in the face of ob- 
scurity or ill health, or amid the cold 
environment of a chilling indifference, to 
fight one's way to the front and to win. 
Any young man who is discouraged be- 
cause of his poverty should remember that 
he belongs to that long and illustrious 
lineage of the poor whose glorious his- 



40 SIX FOOLS 

tory illumines all the centuries that are 
past. 

Assuming that one's parents are Chris- 
tian at heart, in purpose, and in their 
vision of life, it is evident that obedience 
to the fifth commandment must lie at the 
basis of the truest and the most abiding 
success. The one who disobeys this com- 
mandment not only dishonors the father 
who has provided for him, and the mother 
who has so tenderly cared for him — which 
is certainly a black enough sin in itself — 
but he walks directly across one of the 
great laws of God. Yet there are young 
lads who actually think that it is a manly 
thing to disobey their parents, who are 
"not going to be bossed about by the 
governor" nor **held in leading strings by 
the old lady," to use the contemptible 
language so frequently applied to parents 
by the young American of to-day. They 
may speak most contemptuously of their 
fathers as "the old fool," but the world's 
verdict is that they themselves are the 
real fools. There are numbers of young 
men who talked just that way who have 



THE YOUNG FOOL 41 

been shut up in a room a good deal smaller 
than the one in which their parents wished 
them to stay before they went so very 
far in life, a room that was lighted only 
by one little window in its iron door, and 
no latchkey with which to go in and out 
at their own free will. Staying out against 
the will of one's parents often leads to 
staying in altogether, and that behind bolts 
and bars. 

The lack of wholesome restriction in the 
home life points the way inevitably to 
future possible disobedience to the laws 
of the state. The boy who grows up in 
the household having his own way in 
everything, a law unto himself, with all 
the money that he wants to spend, often 
matures into the lawless character, with 
whom the state must have a reckoning 
after a while. Prison restraint is therefore 
often necessary for those who in their 
young life have been brought up without 
home restraint. Many a father, while 
growing rich in acquiring property, has be- 
come a pauper in the deterioration of the 
character values of his children. He has 



42 SIX FOOLS 

started in business completely given over to 
the one idea of money-making. This one 
dominating ideal has through the years 
absorbed all his time and energy. He has 
found it much easier to buy off his son 
with free indulgence and plenty of money 
than to sacrifice upon him any of his val- 
uable time. So, while he has built up his 
great, increasing, and successful business, 
his son has become a fool. 

A man who worships mammon himself 
cannot teach his boy how to reverence 
and to worship God. If a man's business 
ethics is full of sharp practice, deceit, and 
misrepresentation, he can never expect to 
be able to teach his offspring the New 
Testament standard of ethics. No father 
can teach his child integrity, love, and 
truth when he shows out dishonesty, hate, 
and falsehood in his own life. Antichrist 
in the living example of the father often 
means a life against Christ in the conduct 
of the son. A father may teach his son 
the Commandments and the Sermon on 
the Mount, and hear him recite them 
glibly by heart; but it is his own daily 



THE YOUNG FOOL 43 

life that teaches the eternal verities of 
righteousness or bears witness against them. 
The Scriptures place the larger respon- 
sibility upon the father as the head of the 
family, in the proper rearing and training 
of the children. God is represented as 
speaking of Abraham: "I know Abraham, 
that he will command his children and his 
household after him; and they shall keep 
the way of the Lord, to do justice and 
judgment." When Joshua, after the con- 
quest of the promised land, had set up the 
monuments in Gilgal, he said: "When j^our 
children ask their fathers in time to come, 
saying. What mean ye by these stones? 
Then shall ye answer them." The duty of 
instructing the children in the history of 
their people was not delegated to the 
mothers, to the schoolmasters, nor to the 
priests, but it was placed upon the fathers 
in Israel. The Pauline admonition holds 
the father as responsible by precept and 
example for the rightful bringing up of 
the children: "Fathers, provoke not your 
children to wrath: but bring them up in 
the nurture and admonition of the Lord." 



44 SIX FOOLS 

We are living in times when this truth 
needs greater emphasis than has ever been 
given to it before. Numerous fathers in 
this generation are shirking their duty in 
the control, the training, and education 
of their children. In multiplied instances 
the mother is doing all the work which 
pertains to the moral culture of the chil- 
dren in the home. It is frequently the 
case that the father feels that if he is 
known as "a good provider," if he con- 
tributes a liberal sum of money for the 
support of the children, and pays the 
household bills promptly when they come 
in, he has done all that could be ex- 
pected. Meeting the obligations incident 
to the home expense account is the small- 
est part of a father's duty. 

Multitudes of children who have been 
brought up in commodious and luxurious 
homes but without a father's wise and 
thoughtful supervision, and who as a re- 
sult have made moral failures when they 
have come to years of maturity, would 
have had an infinitely better chance for 
happy and successful careers if they had 



THE YOUNG FOOL 45 

grown up in poverty, but with a father's 
strong and watchful care. Upon every 
side may be seen the wrecks of famihes 
that have been brought on through having 
only a nominal father; and it is a ruin 
that can be traced directly to the lack of 
a thoughtful, guiding, and directing father- 
hood. 

In the actual tragedies of everyday life 
we often read the same sad story. Here 
is the picture that is frequently seen in 
real life: We behold a happy family, with 
father, mother, and three little children. 
The eldest of the children is a boy, bright, 
intelligent, and quick to learn, the pride 
of his parents' hearts. All their hopes are 
centered in him. Every wish of his boy- 
hood is gratified. He grows up having his 
own way, pampered, petted, and spoiled. 
The first stepping-stone that leads the way 
to that boy's ruin is the over-indulgence 
of his parents. Receiving too large an 
allowance, it soon becomes evident to all 
that he has altogether too much spending 
money for his own good. He begins to 
show unmistakable signs of recklessness be- 



46 SIX FOOLS 

fore he is twenty. Out late at night, 
keeping bad company, extravagant, pro- 
fane, he drinks and oftentimes to excess. 
He frequents the gambHng hell, and the 
house of her whose "feet go down to death, 
whose steps take hold on hell." Father 
expostulates again and again, but is roughly 
answered. Mother weeps and sisters plead, 
but it is all in vain. The riotous excesses 
of that young man become in time matter 
of public conversation. 

It is the same old story of the wages 
of sin, of the downward road that leads 
to destruction. Luxury has bred dissipa- 
tion, and at last that loved boy goes out 
from that home, under the awful domina- 
tion of sinful appetites and debasing pas- 
sions. He commits a crime for which he 
is tried and convicted, and he serves his 
sentence in the State's prison. Some day 
there flashes over the wires to that home 
the message informing them that their only 
son was shot and instantly killed in a 
saloon in a drunken brawl. 

One of my college mates was the son 
of one of the most distinguished and most 



THE YOUNG FOOL 47 

eloquent preachers that ever stood in the 
Unitarian pulpits of this country, the pastor 
for a number of years of the most prom- 
inent churches of that denomination in 
Chicago, Boston, and New York. The 
young fellow's academic knowledge was of 
the sort that had come from absorption 
rather than from studious application. He 
had a bright mind, could acquire easily, 
and many a time his quick wit helped him 
out with an unprepared lesson. He was 
very companionable, and we were all soon 
calling him by his first name. How well 
do I remember Levin! He was polite, 
ingratiating in his ways, and his genuine 
kindness of heart made him at once a 
general favorite among the students of that 
institution. But when he came to us he 
was already under the bondage of an 
appetite that enslaved him. He often 
drank to intoxication, and every now and 
then he would go to a neighboring town 
and enter upon a spree that would last two 
or three days. The faculty bore with him 
as long as they could for his father's sake. 
But at last forbearance ceasing to be a 



48 SIX FOOLS 

virtue, he was expelled from the institu- 
tion. The president of the college informed 
the father of the expulsion of his son, 
with the full reasons for the action. He 
received in return a draft for the full 
payment of all his son's bills, and was 
requested to settle all of them personally, 
not giving any of the money to the young 
man himself. He was instructed to pur- 
chase for his son his railway ticket clear 
through to Boston, and to give him only 
money enough in addition to pay for his 
meals on the way. That father closed his 
letter with these pathetic words: 'T have 
no fault to find with the action of the 
faculty, for it is a just one. My son had 
his own way too much when he was young, 
and was given too large an allowance. I 
sent him to you in the vain hope that 
with different surroundings and new asso- 
ciations he might be induced to lead a 
new life. But I fear that he is wrecked 
and ruined beyond all recovery. God only 
knows how much I have already suffered 
for my wayward boy, and what I may be 
called upon to suffer in the future." Five 



THE YOUNG FOOL 49 

years after that I one day picked up a 
Chicago daily paper and read in the Asso- 
ciated Press dispatches from Saint Louis 
that the night before Levin had been shot 
and instantly killed in a drunken brawl in 
a Broadway saloon. It was not long after 
that that his father resigned his pulpit, 
retired from the ministry, and after a short 
time spent in retirement he died. It has 
ever since seemed to me, who had this 
chapter from the inside history of that 
brilliant man, that he died of a broken 
heart. 

Young men who start upon careers of 
vice to-day very often begin with a de- 
sire to throw off the home restraints and 
to cut loose from what they term the old- 
fogy notions of Christian parents; but in 
the after years there comes to them the 
vision of themselves and the mother that 
stood there in the open door to say good-by 
as they went forth to make their own way 
in the world. That mother may have been 
one of the old-fashioned kind, who never 
had been one hundred miles away from 
home, who never had seen any large city. 



50 SIX FOOLS 

who never had had any special social or 
educational advantages. That mother may 
have been one of the old-fashioned class, 
whose range of reading was not wide, only 
her Bible, the little town weekly newspaper, 
and one religious paper, who knew nothing 
about the most recent famous novel and 
little concerning the actions of that cir- 
cumlocution establishment down in Wash- 
ington, our national Congress, with its 
ever-present problem, "How not to do it," 
and yet at the same time to keep the 
people thinking that "something's doing" 
at the seat of government. There arises 
in after years the vision of leaving that 
home and that mother, and the man may 
then remember how in his youthful conceit 
he really pitied that mother, in the narrow- 
ness of her vision, in the limited range of 
her opportunities, as he said to himself: 
"Now I am going to have my own way. 
Father and mother and home have held 
me in long enough. What is really mine 
I am going to have from now on, and I am 
not going to be chained down any longer 
by home restraints and by old-fogy no- 



THE YOUNG FOOL 51 

tions." But there is the mighty current 
of the strong influence of moral power, 
of sturdy integrity, and of noblest Chris- 
tian character that flows forth from that 
home, which in the after years is always 
appraised at its true value. 

At one of the greatest art exhibits ever 
held in this country I once saw a painting 
that riveted my attention. Now engrav- 
ings of this masterpiece are often seen, 
but then the picture was new. I refer to 
Hovenden's "Breaking the Home Ties." 
No other work of art in all that large and 
splendid collection attracted so many peo- 
ple and held them so long as did this 
wonderful home scene. No one who ever 
saw this picture could ever forget it. It 
is simply the picture of a boy leaving 
home. You see the living room of a hum- 
ble home, scantily furnished, the dress of 
the inmates being of the plainest kind. 
There stands a mother, with her hands 
upon the shoulders of her boy, looking 
into his face as only a mother can look, 
and giving him parting words of counsel, 
as he is leaving home and breaking the 



52 SIX FOOLS 

ties that have so long held the family 
together. The boy is holding his old felt 
hat in his hand, that is hanging down by 
his side. His clothes are outgrown, ill- 
fitting, and faded. A sister of some twelve 
years of age is leaning against the door- 
post and looking sadly at the departing 
brother. Sitting at the breakfast table, 
from which the dishes have not yet been 
cleared away, is the old, white-haired 
grandmother, with such a gentle, tender, 
wistful look in her dear, sweet face. An 
older sister, apparently about eighteen years 
of age, is sitting in the rear part of the 
room with downcast eyes and sorrowful 
face, her hand resting upon the head of 
an old shepherd dog beside her, looking 
as if he too shared in the general sadness 
of the occasion. The stage driver is 
standing outside the door, with whip in 
hand, waiting for the passenger. The 
father has seized the old carpet satchel, in 
which the boy's worldly effects are care- 
fully packed, and is going out, because 
his heart is too full to remain in the room. 
You glance over the picture and you 



THE YOUNG FOOL 53 

start to go on, but you stop to take an- 
other look, as if chained to the spot by the 
spell of some strong magic. You look at 
the boy with his honest face, and you 
say to yourself, ''What a noble looking 
boy!" You gaze upon the mother with 
her yearning look of love, and you say, 
"What volumes are in that mother's face!" 
Seldom, if ever, have you seen such ex- 
pressiveness pictured upon the canvas as 
you see in that mother's face. It touches 
a chord that vibrates in every soul. Every- 
body seems to say, "Surely I know that 
face"; and then it flashes upon the mind: 
"That is my mother." If you had stood 
there for a long time, as I did within that 
corridor in which that painting hung where 
I first saw it, you would have seen strong 
men turn away again and again and bite 
their lips, endeavoring to gain control of 
their emotions, or hiding the tears, that 
were starting from their eyes. All around 
you people were saying: "Ah! how that 
picture carries me back to the years gone 
by! That is my home and that is my 
mother." You look again at that mother's 



54 SIX FOOLS 

face, and all the past, present, and future 
seem to concentrate there. All the care 
and anxiety of a mother's heart seem to 
have leaped into her face at this supreme 
moment in one grand effort to impress 
that boy with the greatness of a mother's 
love. You see the agonies that she has 
suffered; the sleepless nights of weary 
watching by the bedside of her sick loved 
ones, the unrequited years of toil. You 
also see a touch of motherly pride in a 
noble boy; surely his strong and manly 
face would make any mother justly proud. 
But above all you see an indescribable 
suspense depicted in her countenance. Her 
eyes seem to be looking into the future; 
and that entire panorama which she sees 
floats before you as you study that face. 
Hell from beneath is moved to meet that 
boy. Demons are dispatched to plot his 
destruction. Nets are already spread for 
his ruin in the gilded palaces of sin. All 
this seems to be written in that mother's 
face. 

When you think of the constant mighty 
impulse toward righteousness which the 



THE YOUNG FOOL 55 

love of such a mother will always be to 
that boy, you conclude that he will never 
be the *'fool that despiseth his father's 
instruction," that he will be the ''wise 
son that maketh a glad father" and never 
"the foolish son that is the heaviness of 
his mother." You thank God for the power 
that a Christian mother has of putting 
something into a boy that makes his con- 
science cry out most loudly against it 
when for the first time he stands with 
companions in front of some saloon, some 
gambling den, or some other place of evil 
resort, debating the question as to whether 
he will go in with them or not, and de- 
cides that he will not. The love of a 
Christian mother is the greatest safeguard 
of youthful character. 



II 

THE COMPANION FOOL 



Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. — Pope. 

A man's mind is known by the company it keeps. 
— Lowell. 

It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant 
courage is caught as men take diseases, one of 
another; therefore let men take heed of their com- 
pany. — Shakespeare, 



II 

THE COMPANION FOOL 

Many a noble scriptural character stands 
out in the clear perspective of Bible biog- 
raphy as an illustrious and inspiring exam- 
ple. But the life of Rehoboam is given as 
a warning. Ancestry had done much for 
Rehoboam. The grandson of David and 
the son of Solomon, he was the latter's 
successor to the throne. That ''blood will 
always tell" is a fallacious adage, for the 
nobodies often come from the somebodies, 
and the somebodies frequently spring from 
the nobodies. 

There is a specious philosophy that is 
appearing to-day in much of our current 
literature, in magazines as well as in 
books, that greatly magnifies heredity and 
environment as the makers and molders 
of character, and that minifies or else 
entirely nullifies the influence of the will 
and divine grace. Here is a brief state- 

59 



60 SIX FOOLS 

ment of its principal propositions: Two 
great factors make the sum of human Hfe, 
heredity and environment, and by these 
the character of individuals, or of genera- 
tions, is molded. Man is the resultant 
of his environment and heredity. If they 
impel him in the same direction, he will 
get far; but if they push in opposite direc- 
tions, he may not get anywhere. Man is 
as completely the result of his own nature, 
and impelled to do what he does, as the 
needle to point to the north, or the puppet 
to move according as the string is pulled. 
A man must accept his heredity as an 
unalterable fact. He can do nothing to 
improve or to modify it. 

This is the creed of the fatalist. Its 
fallacy is seen in the omission of a third 
factor which also enters into the sum of 
human life, and which is far greater than 
the other two — the will. Heredity, environ- 
ment, will — these are the trium^drate that 
determine human destiny. Man possesses 
a self -determining power, which makes him 
not the creature but the creator of cir- 
cumstances and which enables him to turn 



THE COMPANION FOOL 61 

obstacles into stepping-stones that lead to 
final victory. This is the only theory that 
can give to us a true interpretation of life; 
it alone can account for the facts that 
are revealed in the book of human expe- 
rience; it alone can explain the remarkable 
development of multitudes of people, who 
did not have the help of royal heritage or 
of inspiring environment, but whose glo- 
rious achievements have won the admira- 
tion of the world. 

Myriads of noble characters have come 
up from most lowly conditions and have 
stood forth in all their strength and beauty, 
like the pure, white petals of the pond 
lily that has sprung from the mud and 
mire beneath. Multitudes of God's noblest 
heroes have through force of will con- 
quered both heredity and environment and 
have illumined and glorified all the cen- 
turies with the light of their splendid 
victories. 

The Athenians erected a statue to ^sop, 
who was born a slave, that the Grecians 
might know that the way to honor is open 
to all. An American general, who grad- 



62 SIX FOOLS 

uated at West Point the first in his class 
and arose to high rank on the basis of 
pure merit, said: "I inherited nothing from 
my father in Vermont but a pair of second- 
hand trousers, an old worn-out seal skin 
cap, and a tendency to rheumatism." A 
poor little thirteen-year-old newsboy, run- 
ning into Detroit over the Grand Trunk 
railroad, lost his job through breaking a 
bottle of sulphuric acid and filling one of 
the cars with an unearthly odor, while 
experimenting with chemicals. He got not 
only trounced but bounced by the con- 
ductor, who declared that he wouldn't have 
any boy on his train who was fooling with 
chemicals all the time. 

Heredity and environment might have 
said to him: "You've lost your job. What's 
the use of your trying to amount to any- 
thing or to be anybody.^ You might as 
well give up." But the masterful will said: 
"I'll make it win in life yet." That dis- 
charged newsboy became the wizard of 
Menlo Park, Thomas A. Edison. He was 
not the creature but the creator of circum- 
stances, the architect of his own character. 



THE COMPANION FOOL 63 

A mighty purpose, that comes from a 
commanding will, gathers in power from 
the forces that oppose. It feeds upon 
defeat. It grows under misfortune. It 
matures under the fiercest tropical heat of 
repeated disaster. Adversity only serves to 
redouble diligence. Opposition only whets 
the more keenly the edge of the sword 
of resolution. Mountains dwindle into 
molehills before the man who is dominated 
by a worthy and a noble purpose. Ob- 
stacles that seemed unconquerable are not 
only overcome, but they are converted 
into helps toward success by the over- 
whelming will. Where the Mississippi be- 
gins a little brook flowing from the Itasca 
lake, or where the Missouri rises in the 
Rocky Mountain range, their streams are 
so small, that they could be pumped dry 
in a few short hours. But behold them in 
their mighty currents at Saint Louis and 
at New Orleans, and you will see there 
volumes of water that are irresistible and 
inexhaustible. So it is that an all-dominat- 
ing purpose that comes from a masterful 
will gathers in strength and volume with 



64 SIX FOOLS 

every passing day. It makes everything 
subservient to the one great end. It gathers 
from all sources in life until its current 
is irresistible and its volume is inexhaustible. 
One might as well try to dam up the 
Amazon with bulrushes, or to stop the 
current of the Saint Lawrence with bundles 
of baled hay, as to try to turn aside the 
man whose life is eternally linked to a 
mighty purpose. 

Fatalism holds that pedigree has every- 
thing to do with our lives. The goodness 
that we manifest is only the outcropping 
of inherited goodness; the evil that appears 
in our actions is only the outgrowth of 
inherited evil. If we are good, we cannot 
help it, because our ancestors have been 
good; and if we are bad, we are not respon- 
sible for it, because it is the direct out- 
growth of some evil that we have inherited. 
This is fatalism pure and simple. It denies 
entirely the freedom of the will, and makes 
man a mere machine, a characterless au- 
tomaton, without the power of volition. 
Here is one who says: "There is no use 
for me to try to be moral, decent, and 



THE COMPANION FOOL Q5 

good, because this old blood that I inherit 
from my ancestors makes me a born villain 
and a perpetual scoundrel." The person 
who talks that way is acting the part of 
the veriest coward, and by his mental 
attitude, as well as actions, is giving the 
wholesale denial to one of the great funda- 
mental teachings of God's Word, that 
"where sin abounded grace did much more 
abound," and "for this cause the Son of 
God was manifested, that he might destroy 
the works of the devil." In the realm of 
Divine grace all are held as morally ac- 
countable for what thej^ do, however strong 
their inherited inclinations toward evil. All 
are amenable before God to use all the 
energy of soul and all the grace that God 
will give to them in fighting against these 
evil tendencies and in doing right even with 
a nature that may have received an inherited 
bent toward the wrong. Many of the 
noblest souls that have blessed humanity 
by their labors have sprung from the 
most unpromising moral stock. They have 
become so sound and pure as to be totally 
unlike their parents, and the centers of 



66 SIX FOOLS 

the most wholesome and gracious influ- 
ences. Restraining and conquering their 
inbred tendencies to evil, they have won 
the esteem and veneration of the world. 
Michael Faraday came of the humblest 
and poorest parentage, the family living 
in London all huddled together in a little 
single room over a livery stable, in which 
the father was employed as a helper. He 
began life as a newsboy, became an errand 
boy in Sir Humphry Davy's chemical 
laboratory, and then one of the wonders 
of the age in science. When Sir Humphry 
Davy was once asked: "What do you 
regard as your greatest discovery .f^" he 
replied, "Michael Faraday." John Tyndall 
said of Michael Faraday: "He was the 
greatest experimental philosopher that the 
world has ever seen." 

Henry Wilson received as his inheritance 
from his father, who was a lazy, shiftless, 
illiterate, drunken loafer, a terrible appetite 
for liquor, against which he fought all his 
life and always victorious. The name he 
bore was not his real name, for when he 
came of age he took another name to 



THE COMPANION FOOL 67 

escape in some measure the odium of his 
father's worthless life. He was cradled in 
poverty. Many a time when a child he 
cried for bread when there was none to 
give him. Bound out at the age of ten 
to a farmer, who was a hard taskmaster, 
he worked for him like a slave until he 
was twenty-one. Allowed to attend school 
but one month in each year, yet during 
the eleven years of his bondage he read 
through over one thousand books that he 
obtained from the neighboring village 
library, making their contents all his own. 
His scholastic training, which was limited 
to a few terms in the academy, did not 
begin until he had reached an age when 
others have finished theirs. In spite of 
these almost overwhelming obstacles, he 
steadily grew in character, influence, and 
power, until he was elected to the Massa- 
chusetts State Legislature. There he made 
his famous speech against slavery, that 
drew to him the eyes of the whole nation. 
He was recognized as a mighty political 
leader, and as one of the greatest orators 
of the anti-slavery times. After seventeen 



68 SIX FOOLS 

years of conspicuous and honored service 
as a member of the United States Senate 
he closed his poHtical career as the nation's 
Vice-President. 

Dr. Thomas John Barnardo, of London, 
known throughout the world as "The 
Father of Nobody's Children," demon- 
strated through his lifework that moral 
character of the strongest and best fiber 
can be developed from the most unprom- 
ising moral stock. He was a man of 
intense Christian devotion and consecration. 
While a young student of medicine in 
London, fitting himself to go to China as 
a medical missionary, he received what 
was to him a special call to devote his life 
to work among the neglected people of 
London. Beginning there his lifework by 
helping one boy, who had no home, he 
soon came to know of the frightful condi- 
tion of multitudes of homeless children. 
After having completed his medical course 
he first used a donkey stable as a place 
of refuge for his boys. This humble re- 
treat grew until it had expanded into 
magnificent buildings, that covered whole 



THE COMPANION FOOL 69 

blocks, accommodating thousands of chil- 
dren, who were taken from the London 
slums, were given schooling and industrial 
training, were saved from careers of vice 
and crime and were enabled to achieve 
honorable positions in life. He instituted 
an emigration agency which provided for 
the transportation of young people to 
Canada and Australia. Tens of thousands 
of hopeless outcast boys and girls who had 
been rescued, reclaimed, and educated by 
this man were sent out into all the lands 
where English power has gone. Dr. Bar- 
nardo delivered public addresses upon his 
work all over Great Britain, and he re- 
peatedly declared that it was proven by 
statistics, which they kept most carefully 
from year to year, that ninety-five per 
cent of his boys and girls turned out well. 
The New York Children's Aid Society, 
during the more than a half century that 
it has been in existence, has gathered up 
more than fifty thousand children, most of 
them little street waifs, boys and girls who 
have been the products of the New York 
slums, and has sent them westward, where 



70 SIX FOOLS 

they have been taken into the homes of 
farmers and others and reared to manhood 
and womanhood. Two Httle waifs, com- 
panions in poverty, were picked up by this 
society in the streets of New York, sent 
west, and were adopted into the famihes 
of Indiana farmers. They occupied the 
same car seat on their westward journey, 
munched their sandwiches together, drank 
out of the same tin cup, took bites out of 
the same apple, and wondered what kind 
of homes they were going to get into, when 
they got out West. One of them became 
a Hoosier schoolmaster and the governor 
of Alaska; the other worked his way 
through college and went to North Dakota, 
where he became the governor of that 
commonwealth. It is conservatively esti- 
mated from the reports of the agents of 
this society, and from letters received from 
the homes in which these children have 
been placed, that at least ninety per cent 
of them turn out well. Booker T. Wash- 
ington, born a slave in a log cabin, where 
his mother was cook for the plantation 
farm house, sleeping in a pallet on the 



THE COMPANION FOOL 71 

dirt floor of the kitchen, where he first 
saw the light, had as his principal garment 
during his boyhood days a long tow shirt 
made from the roughest part of the flax. 
When we see him learning to read by walk- 
ing ten miles every day to and from the 
home of his teacher, after his day's work 
was done, it looks like a long, hard journey 
from this condition of illiteracy to grad- 
uating with highest honors at Hampton 
Institute. It is a wide remove from 
wearing a tow-shirt to the wearing of the 
classic cap and gown in receiving his 
honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from 
Harvard University, and from eating corn 
bread and bacon with his fingers out of 
a tin pan in a slave's hut to dining with 
the president of Harvard at his home in 
Cambridge, and as an invited guest eating 
at the same table with our nation's Chief 
Magistrate in the White House at Wash- 
ington. From lowliest surroundings often 
spring noblest souls, even as from darkest 
soils there grow fairest flowers. 

Alfred Russel Wallace has defined his 
position upon this subject of heredity, in 



72 SIX FOOLS 

which he takes the strongest grounds 
against reckoning with fatalism as an 
admitted factor in human Hfe. He says: 
"The men whose originaUty and mental 
power have created landmarks in the his- 
tory of human progress have been self- 
taught. They have certainly derived noth- 
ing from the training of their ancestors 
in their several departments of knowledge." 
Superexcellence in any business or in any 
profession appears not so much an inherited 
gift as the result of self-discipline, self- 
training, and self-culture. It matters not 
whether a boy is born in a log cabin or 
in a mansion, in a cottage or in a brown- 
stone front, if he is actuated by a noble, 
mighty, controlling, all-dominating purpose, 
neither men nor demons can keep him 
from coming to the front and gaining 
success and honor. More than a century 
and a half ago Alexander Pope, in his 
"Essay on Man," expressed this great 
truth, which is confirmed to-day by some 
of our best modern scientists: 

Honor and shame from no condition rise; 
Act well your part: there all the honor lies. 



THE COMPANION FOOL 73 

In Rehoboam's time it was very evident 
that in their confederation the twelve tribes 
had been imperfectly united. A deeply 
rooted jealousy manifested itself between 
the tribes of Israel in general and the tribe 
of Judah in particular. The powerful 
Ephraimites would not submit to being 
curtailed in their power and authority or 
reduced to any inferior position. They 
felt most keenly the omission as an affront 
if they were not consulted with reference 
to any new enterprise that might be under- 
taken by any of the confederated tribes. 
AYhen, immediately succeeding the death 
of Saul, the tribe of Judah, without wait- 
ing to consult the other tribes, came 
together and crowned David as their king, 
intertribal war broke out, and it continued 
until the house of Saul was almost exter- 
minated before David's government was 
accepted and acknowledged by the whole 
nation. The latent jealousy was not entirely 
uprooted even then, for other differences 
arose that tended to increase the trouble. 
David transferred his court from Shechem, 
the ancient capital, to Jerusalem, and also 



74 SIX FOOLS 

removed the tabernacle from Shiloh thither, 
making Jerusalem the religious and political 
capital of his newly acquired kingdom. The 
Ephraimites and all the other tribes, that 
were in full sympathy with them, felt that 
these distinctions bestowed on Judah were 
slights cast upon themselves. Solomon's 
extravagant expenditures had imposed 
heavy burdens on the people which they 
were not willing to bear. His reign had 
been prosperous and magnificent, yet by 
reason of its excessive taxation it had 
proven so oppressive that large numbers 
of the people were ready upon the first 
favorable opportunity to protest and to 
rebel. 

The day that Rehoboam was crowned 
as king furnished that opportunity. If 
ever it was needed that a young man 
should consult and act upon the advice 
of those older and wiser than himself, 
should show tact, good judgment, and con- 
ciliatory ways, it was then. The corona- 
tion day came. The sacred oil was out- 
poured upon the bending head of the 
young monarch. The resplendent crown, 



THE COMPANION FOOL 75 

glittering with burnished gold and sparkling 
with precious stones, was placed upon his 
head. But no glad shouts greeted the 
newly crowned king. An ominous silence 
reigned, and a sullen gloom was seen rest- 
ing upon the upturned faces of the multi- 
tude. Rehoboam, pale and nervous, knew 
not what to do. Jeroboam now stepped 
quickly to the front as the champion for 
the rights of the people, and looking Reho- 
boam full in the face, he boldly said: "Thy 
father made our yoke grievous. Make 
thou the grievous service of thy father, 
and the heavy yoke, which he put upon 
us, lighter, and we will serve thee." Reho- 
boam desired three days for considering 
this important matter. He called first a 
council of the old and experienced states- 
men, and after hearing their advice he 
summoned a convention of the young men, 
the empty-headed fops, who had been his 
boon companions before his accession to 
the throne. He rejected the gentle and 
conciliatory measures that were recom- 
mended by the wise, gray -headed coun- 
selors, and accepted the foolish, senseless. 



76 SIX FOOLS 

and almost idiotic advice that was given 
him by those young bloods in the vealy 
stage of their mental development. At 
the end of the allotted time he said to the 
people: "My little finger shall be thicker 
than my father's loins. Whereas my father 
put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put 
more to your yoke. My father chastised 
you with whips, but I will chastise you 
with scorpions." Such scourging words 
bore at once inflammatory fruitage; the 
pent-up indignation of the people burst 
into open revolt; the ten tribes quickly 
separated from the other two; the covenant 
nation was rent in twain. 

The great principles in the philosophy of 
history have found their counterpart in 
every country and in every age. Tj^ranny 
and cruelty upon the part of the ruler 
have often resulted in open revolt and 
rebellion upon the part of the people. 
But the great national upheavals that 
have followed, under a benignant Prov- 
idence, have always borne the rich fruits 
of a larger, broader liberty and a better, 
nobler peace. Think of the times when 



I 



THE COMPANION FOOL 77 

the mandates of despotic power have 
scourged the land with consuming torch 
and murderous dagger, with widespread 
devastation and cruel bloodshed; times 
when liberty, right, equality, justice all 
seem to have sunk into the chaos of an- 
archy: yet out of these charred and black- 
ened ruins there have sprung, like the 
growth from the dragon's teeth of old 
from Grecian soil, the elements of a new 
life, the germ principles of something 
grander, nobler, and better. The conquer- 
ing legions of Alexander opened the hitherto 
barred gateways of the savage East for 
the entrance of the arts and civil institu- 
tions of Greece. Constantinople in the 
middle of the fifteenth century was stormed 
and pillaged by the Turks, after one of 
the most cruel and bloody sieges known 
in history. But, like the branch of the 
odorous gum tree, that sends forth its 
sweetest fragrance only after it has been 
bruised and broken, so this city of the 
Byzantine emperors sent up from its ruins 
the mighty impulse of the New Learning, 
that thrilled all Europe into a new moral 



78 SIX FOOLS 

and intellectual life. Listen to the funereal 
tones of the bell of the Saint Germain 
L'Auxerrois, as it rings out the death knell 
for thousands of happy homes in France 
upon the morning of Saint Bartholomew's 
Day. Its first notes have scarcely died 
away before the first Huguenot is ruth- 
lessly struck down. The air is rent with 
shrieks of agony, and the streets of France 
run red with innocent blood, while the 
bell tolls out its sad refrain. But amid 
that discord we can now catch the rich 
refrain of a * 'harmony not then under- 
stood." There is a chime of sweetest 
music, that speaks above the harsh clangor 
of that bell, that tells of the grand future 
of religious freedom. The maxim of Louis 
XIV of France, "I am the state," was the 
synonym for a most despotic and arbitrary 
government. His age was most brilliant in 
literature, in commerce, and in art; yet 
his corrupt and profligate reign, with its 
exorbitant taxation, paved the way for the 
French Revolution, which in its death 
agonies gave birth to that principle of 
liberty which has found its full fruition 



THE COMPANION FOOL 79 

in the French RepubHc of to-day. Out of 
the throes of our own Civil War there 
came the destruction of State sovereignty, a 
restored Union, and Kberty for the slave, 
and, surely, these factors, made secure in 
our nation's life, were worth all that it 
cost to get them. 

So the open revolt of the people against 
Rehoboam and the bitter and destructive 
wars that ensued led the way eventually 
to the greater national prosperity and to 
the larger spiritual blessings of the later 
reigns of Asa and Jehoshaphat. 

Rehoboam 's unfortunate career continued 
just as it had begun. Folly and failure 
were its most distinguishing traits. 

Every young person starting out in life 
may take the wise admonitions of competent 
counselors, or he may act upon the shallow 
and senseless teachings of those who are 
giddy, fast, and rash, and who speak most 
contemptuously of their seniors as "old 
fogies"; and as a direct consequence of 
following their counsels he may at an early 
age end his life in wreck and ruin. Stand- 
ing within the full shadow cast by Reho- 



80 SIX FOOLS 

boam's bad beginning and resulting failure, 
we emphasize the necessity of getting the 
right start in life. As all depends upon 
our getting the right start, all education, 
both of the home and the school, should 
be helpful toward making the proper be- 
ginning in life. Starting right leads into 
the only pathway of happiness, for one is 
never so happy as when he is successfully 
engaged in doing that which he can do 
well. It is the only path to real worth, for 
the value of an individual to society de- 
pends upon his being in the right place 
and doing his own appropriate work. It 
is the only path to national prosperity. 
The growth and perfection of the body 
depend upon each organ fulfilling its own 
functions, and the health and development 
of the body politic depend upon each 
individual understanding and developing 
his own powers and building his own best 
work into the great structure of the whole. 
When a young person stands facing the 
years that lie before him, the most serious 
question that confronts him is whether he 
is going to succeed or not. It must be 



THE COMPANION FOOL 81 

understood that what God makes a boy 
by nature stands in a certain kind of 
fixed relation to what that boy will be 
able to make out of himself by growth 
and acquirement. Many of the failures of 
life are due to people working at cross 
purposes with their own aptitudes. God 
made us all to be good for something; but 
the key to success is lodged somewhere 
within ourselves, and the chief thing, para- 
mount to all else, is to get hold of the 
right key. God meant something in bring- 
ing every one of us into existence. Every 
man's life is a plan of God, and the first 
thing for us to do is to get at God's meaning 
in our separate creations. Men are con- 
stantly making failures in life because 
they are trying to do what, from the 
human standpoint, God never intended 
them to do. 

Our solar system gets along very well 
so long as each planet moves in its own 
orbit. But suppose Mercury and Venus 
should try to run on the same road in- 
stead of the different tracks in which they 
now travel; suppose the earth and Mars 



82 SIX FOOLS 

should try to change places; suppose Jupi- 
ter and Saturn should seek to get out of 
their old established routes and then run 
to suit themselves, what would be the 
result? Our solar system would come to 
an end in a most tremendous smash-up. 
God has marked out orbits for men as 
well as for planets, and men fall far short 
of success and go under because they fail 
to find the path in which God intended 
them to move. We find many misfits in 
business and professional life, because of 
the failure of men at the very threshold 
of life honestly, seriously, and candidly to 
take an inventory of what they have in its 
direct relation to what they expect to do. 
We find professional men who have failed 
to make good who would have made fine 
business men; poor business men who would 
have made good professional men; unsuc- 
cessful lawyers who would have made 
successful physicians; mediocre physicians 
who would have made splendid lawyers; 
preachers who are flat failures in the 
ministry but who would have been very 
successful in something else. A friend of 



THE COMPANION FOOL 83 

mine who is in the work of the ministry 
in another denomination has a son, now in 
middle Hfe, who as soon as he could walk 
and talk manifested a perfect passion for 
machinery. When only a small boy he 
learned perfectly the mechanism of an 
engine. He made a small engine with his 
own hands that ran perfectly. He could 
think and talk of nothing but engines. 
After the completion of his high school 
course, his father sent him to college, but 
at the end of the freshman year he came 
home declaring that he had no taste for 
the studies that were most prominent in 
that college curriculum, and that he would 
never go back. He started in half a dozen 
different lines of business and failed at 
every one of them through lack of aptitude. 
At last he got into a railroad machine shop 
and settled down at what he knew was 
his life's work. He became a self-made 
mechanical engineer, and is now at the 
head of a department in one of the great- 
est manufacturing plants in the world. 

Efficiency experts can now be secured for 
all lines of productive industries, whose 



84 SIX FOOLS 

business it is to investigate and then in- 
form boards of managers how losses can 
be stopped, how waste can be ehminated, 
and how the machinery of the plant can 
be operated at the least expense. We have 
church efficiency experts, whose advice is 
now sought in deciding upon the best 
locations for new city churches, in defining 
the kind of a church which should be 
built to fit a given neighborhood, and in 
rearranging the working program of the 
downtown church to suit changed condi- 
tions. Should we not have efficiency ex- 
perts in our universities, colleges, and high 
schools, whose business it should be, after 
a careful study of the individual adapt- 
abilit}^ to suggest to each student a group 
of activities in the lifework for which he 
is best suited, and thus by eliminating the 
waste of time that comes from misapplied 
energy, endeavor to fit him at once into 
his life task by gi^ang him the right start? 
Wise counsel for the right start in life is 
needed now as much as in Rehoboam's day. 
It is to our highest advantage, intel- 
lectually and morally, to gather around us 



THE COMPANION FOOL 85 

the right sort of friends and companions. 
That was a very suggestive placard that 
hung in a store window — "A large stock of 
goods and civility always on hand." If 
a reasonable amount of civility is expected 
in getting and holding custom and trade, 
it must also be manifested in securing and 
retaining our friends. "A man that hath 
friends must show himself friendly." But 
we must go deeper than the outer conduct 
to find the fundamental and abiding prin- 
ciple of true friendship. We must learn to 
love humanity, we must get into cordial 
relations with those about us, we must 
secure the responsive feeling to the wants 
and needs of the universal human heart, 
that "touch of sympathy" which "makes 
the whole world akin," we must acquire 
the spirit of genuine helpfulness, and then 
friends will come to us because we shall 
then be able to give to them in wealth of 
character what they in a noble reciprocity 
will be able to impart to us in riches of 
soul. The wily politician, who seeks friends 
only in order that he may use them for 
promoting his own selfish interests, has 



86 SIX FOOLS 

always been treated with the just contempt 
that he has deserved. But the abihty to 
secure and to hold friends has always been 
one of the largest factors in the way to 
true success. 

Some of Lincoln's enemies sneeringly 
said of him in the early part of his career, 
"Lincoln has no capital but a lot of friends." 
But it was Lincoln's immeasurable capacity 
for friendship that made his splendid career 
possible; his ability to make and to hold 
friends was one of the greatest elements 
that led to his becoming the nation's Chief 
Magistrate. 

Garfield possessed in a marked degree 
this same magnificent quality, that pre- 
pared for him so large a place in the hearts 
of the American people. He often visited 
the great industrial plants in the manu- 
facturing towns of his congressional dis- 
trict, and would always stop and shake 
hands and converse with almost every 
begrimed and smut-covered laborer in the 
establishment. Not even Garfield's bitter- 
est political enemies ever accused him of 
doing this to win votes; for they w^ell knew 



THE COMPANIOIV FOOL 87 

it was all prompted by his inherent large- 
heartedness, by his genuine love for men. 
He was always deeply interested in the 
welfare of the laboring classes, for he well 
remembered the time when he himself was 
a poor, barefoot farmer's boy; when he 
drove the mules upon the towpath of the 
Erie canal at ten dollars a month and his 
board; when he took that contract at his 
northern Ohio home for chopping one hun- 
dred cords of wood at twenty-five cents 
a cord, to earn the money that would give 
him a start toward defraying the expenses 
of a college education. He became in this 
way most closely allied with the toiling 
millions of the country. He was prepared 
to represent the people because he was 
always in sympathy with the masses. 
When he lay in the White House, wounded 
and dying, his physicians advised a change 
to the air of the seashore, and his special 
train from Washington to Long Branch was 
driven at a high rate of speed, making as 
few stops as possible along the route. 
Multiplied thousands gathered at the differ- 
ent stations along the line, and stood there 



88 SIX FOOLS 

sorrowful and silent, with uncovered heads, 
while the train swept on. A brief stop was 
made at one small station, where some 
sweat-covered laboring men quickly rolled 
some baggage trucks up close to the Pres- 
ident's car and climbed up on them to 
get a look at their wounded and dying 
chief. The attendants quickly started to 
the door of the Pullman to order them to 
get down and be gone at once. The 
President saw it all, and was deeply moved 
at the scene. With his weak and trembling 
voice he said: "Do not drive those poor 
men away. It can do me no harm. Let 
them be gratified." When the train started 
he gave to that little group of common 
day laborers a kindly smile and a gentle 
wave of his feeble hand in response to their 
tearful interest. With Garfield the insignia 
and adornment of high ofiicial position 
never covered up his manhood; and in his 
death we lost not only a good President but 
a still greater man and Christian brother. 

Men and women of the strongest char- 
acter have always felt the large debt which 
they have owed to the soulful intimacy of 



I 



THE COMPANION FOOL 89 

the closest friendships. All true friendship 
must rest upon the foundation of mutual 
confidence, and the deepest friendship re- 
quires similarity of sympathy and prin- 
ciples. It requires the same general trend 
and quality of life, together with such 
personal differences as make one friend the 
complement of the other. Such friends are 
like complementary colors, which are so 
related to each other that when blended 
together they produce white light, and are 
so named because each color makes up 
to the other what it lacks to make it white. 
They thus belong to one another, and 
each is the brighter and better for the 
presence of the other. 

The friendship between David and Jon- 
athan deserves to be regarded as one of 
the most perfect, one of the most beau- 
tiful, that has ever been known. Their 
friendship began upon the day of David's 
return from the victory over the Philistine 
giant, and continued without a single 
break until death divided them. When 
David, returning from his victory over 
Goliath, was met by the companies of 



90 SIX FOOLS 

women out of all the cities of Israel with 
instruments of music, singing their joyful 
song of welcome to the home-coming con- 
queror, and that great tide of bitter jealousy 
surged through the soul of Saul, Jonathan, 
looking upon this young man who was to 
be king instead of himself, was unenvious. 
That which aroused Saul to hatred moved 
Jonathan to love. Such beautiful mag- 
nanimity of spirit aroused the best that 
was in David in response. Ancient cove- 
nants of friendship were sometimes made 
between two persons by the intermingling 
of blood, transfusing the same in small 
quantity from the veins in the arm of the 
one to that of the other. The covenant 
of friendship established between David and 
Jonathan may have been of this kind, and 
this may be the explanation for that state- 
ment about them: '*The soul of Jonathan 
was knit with the soul of David, and 
Jonathan loved him as his own soul." 
When David was a fleeing and hunted 
fugitive, Jonathan frequently sought him 
out in his hiding places, comforted and 
encouraged him, cheered bim with assur- 



THE COMPANION FOOL 91 

ances of the time that was near at hand, 
when his troubles and dangers would cease, 
when his edict of banishment would be 
revoked and he should become Israel's 
king. Jonathan, above all, poured into 
his aching heart the healing balm of reli- 
gious consolation. "He strengthened his 
hand in God." David "behaved himself 
wisely in all his ways." His trust was in 
the Lord, and thus did he voice his faith 
in God: "In God have I put my trust: 
I will not be afraid what man can do unto 
me." "And the Lord was with him." 
Jonathan's noble character was also dis- 
closed by his filial devotion to his unfor- 
tunate father, and he showed the same 
trust in God that David manifested. This 
religious tie knit their hearts all the more 
closely together. David possessed rare 
accomplishments. He was a poet and a 
musician, and was faithful and courageous 
even to heroism. How the true warrior 
spirit shone out in him when, as a young 
shepherd lad, he appeared before Saul, 
whose first impulse was to rebuke him for 
his temerity in daring to go out against the 



92 SIX FOOLS 

mighty Philistine champion. But the king 
found as he questioned him that this "son 
of Jesse the Bethlehemite" feared no being 
but God. He modestly recounted how when 
he was a servant keeping his father's sheep, 
a lion and a bear attacking the flock, he 
had slain them both; and he declared, in 
a spirit of invincible valor, that the uncir- 
cumcised Philistine would be as one of 
them in that he had defied the armies of 
the living God. Jonathan was also a brave 
and fearless soldier, and had performed 
some very daring feats of arms. Accom- 
panied only by his armor-bearer, he had 
captured a mountain fortress of the Phil- 
istines. Thus they were mutually drawn 
the one to the other, because each one 
possessed attracting qualities. Their friend- 
ship was disinterested, unselfish, and recip- 
rocally helpful. Its bonds held as strongly 
in adversity as in prosperity. It was 
faithful and constant to the end. 

Many a person can point to some long 
friendship which has been to him a con- 
tinuous source of inspiration and comfort, 
a friendship which went on in the ordinary 



THE COMPANION FOOL 93 

round of life with the usual interchange of 
work and play, with the talk about books 
and business, about neighbors and old 
memories, until that person woke up after 
a time to find himself another person, 
remade by another's personality. The one 
who has come under such formative influ- 
ence has journeyed slowly to the other's 
point of view. He has heard the story of 
the other's crises; of the stress of his 
struggles; how he felt at this crucial mo- 
ment and that; how bitter were certain 
great disappointments, which afterward 
yielded the peaceable fruits of righteousness; 
how some oppressive burdens of sorrow, 
which seemed at the time greater than 
could possibly be borne, lifted the soul to 
a firmer grasp upon God and to a stronger 
faith in the unseen things which are 
eternal. Thus the one whose life has been 
recreated has gone on stage by stage, 
living the life of the other, seeing and 
feeling things as the other has seen and 
felt them, until he has at last been trans- 
formed into the likeness of the other, "into 
the same image and from glory to glory." 



94 SIX FOOLS 

The deepest and most enduring friend- 
ship among men can be found only in the 
religious atmosphere and in supreme love 
to God. Jesus spent the whole night in 
prayer just before he chose his disciple- 
friends. He said later concerning these 
hours spent in prayer over the choice of 
his disciples, ''Thine they were, and thou 
gavest them to me." When men succeed 
in finding a real spiritual leader the union 
between him and them is a union that 
has been made in heaven. Can we under- 
stand what Jesus's capacity for friendship 
really meant, when he said to them, "I 
have called you friends".^ The greatest 
change that this world has ever witnessed 
grew out of that friendship between Christ 
and his disciples, and the gospel story that 
tells about it. The disciples, whom Jesus 
called into his service, were fishermen, 
tanners, and publicans — all men who were 
taken from the common walks of life. 
They were not exceptional men in any 
sense of the word, and were very immature 
at the time they were first called. They 
were poorly informed and furnished as to 



THE COMPANION FOOL 95 

education, and exceedingly limited in spir- 
itual experience. These men listened daily 
to his teachings as they traveled about 
with him on foot from place to place, often 
wearied with their long overland journeys. 
The touch and influence of his powerful 
personality are especially brought out in 
one vivid incident. They had been in 
labors abundant, and were very weary 
from a hard day's march, as they drew 
near to a village, where they expected to 
find rest and refreshment. But the mes- 
sengers whom they had sent on ahead 
met them when they came up with un- 
pleasant news. They were told that they 
would not be received. Only those who 
know what it is to be refused hospitality 
when they are weary and hungry can 
understand what this message meant to 
them. Such moments will show the real 
man, for then he is off his guard. There 
was nothing to do but to tramp on; so on 
they went. But the disciples were angry 
and spoke hot words, desiring Elijah's 
power to call down fire on that village 
and consume it. Jesus was as hungry 



96 



SIX FOOLS 



and as weary as any of them, "but he 
turned and rebuked them and said: Ye 
know not what manner of spirit ye are 
of. For the Son of man is not come 
to destroy men's hves, but to save them." 
Thus Jesus took these men into his friend- 
ship and companionship and changed them 
from ordinary into extraordinary moral 
forces. He took these plain, ignorant men 
and through his daily association with 
them transformed them into the trained 
and cultured leaders of that new kingdom 
that was to change the world. He took 
common stones and made them into mighty 
foundations for the new Jerusalem. He 
transformed the charcoal into diamonds. 
How profound, therefore, is the underlying 
philosophy of his words — "I have called 
you friends; all things that I have heard 
of my Father, I have made known unto 
you"! The scribes, the Pharisees, the 
elders, the high priests, and many others 
who studied these disciples at close hand 
"perceived that they were unlearned and 
ignorant men." But when they saw how 
they had been made magnetic and thrilling 



THE COMPANION FOOL 97 

with a new power — a power that drew 
people to them wherever they went, that 
had made them moral giants in attacking 
the evils of their time, and that had clothed 
their words with fire when they spoke — 
"they marveled, and they took knowledge 
of them that they had been with Jesus." 
It is our precious privilege to come into 
the circle of the same friendship and com- 
panionship of the One who will give to 
us like knowledge and wisdom, like courage 
and moral power. 

One of the never-ending series of life's 
tragedies arises from the frequent choice 
that people make of bad companionships, 
when they might have chosen the good. 
I heard John B. Gough in his great lec- 
ture on "Man and His Masters," which 
he delivered hundreds of times in all parts 
of the globe, during his forty years upon 
the lecture platform, say with all the im- 
passioned fervor of his great soul, "Young 
man, I would willingly give my right hand 
if I could forget all that I have learned 
from bad company." 

The Chicago dailies told recently of the 



98 SIX FOOLS 

body of a young man apparently between 
twenty-five and thirty years of age that 
was removed from the Chicago River. 
Before committing suicide by jumping into 
the water he had gone through all the 
clothing that he was wearing and had 
deliberately cut out the initials of his 
name and the laundry mark so as to render 
identification impossible. But this note 
was found in his pocket written with an 
indelible pencil: "I got in with a bad bunch, 
and whisky did the rest. I do not wish 
to be known. I want my name and my 
memory to perish with me." In less than 
two weeks after the remains of that young 
man had been buried in the potter's field, 
the Chicago chief of police received over 
one hundred letters from anxious parents 
scattered all over northern Illinois, Indiana, 
and Iowa, asking for a full description of 
that body. There are multitudes of par- 
ents all over our land whose sons have 
gotten into the wrong crowd and are known 
to be going the pace that kills. Many a 
mother has been almost broken-hearted 
over the boy who has gone forth from the 



THE COMPANION FOOL 99 

loving home circle and is now traveling 
the path of the prodigal in some far country. 
Many a father has had his last days filled 
with the wormwood and the gall of bitter- 
ness because of the ineffaceable disgrace 
brought upon the family through the ac- 
tions of a profligate son. 

Warning comes from all sources against 
bad company. It comes from the old 
home, to which the ruined young man 
has been brought back, that he may be 
nursed in his dying moments by the lov- 
ing mother who cared for him so tenderly 
in his boyhood. It comes from the city 
hospital, where the pitiful wreck of a once 
promising young manhood has been car- 
ried to die among strangers. It comes 
from the haunts of vice, where the victim 
of sin dies, and with his last breath re- 
proaches the evil companions who led him 
astray. It comes from the convict's cell, 
where the young prisoner tells the visitor 
that bad company brought him to ruin. 
It comes from the deathbed, where the 
young infidel dies in despair and denounces 
the companions who taught him his first 



100 SIX FOOLS 

lessons in infidelity. It comes from the 
scaffold or from the electric chair, where 
the criminal about to suffer the extreme 
penalty of the law, with arms pinioned and 
with his last spoken words, just before the 
black cap is drawn over his face and the 
sheriff's finger touches the fatal button or 
his foot presses the deadly trigger, warns 
all young men to beware of bad company. 
The warning comes from all these sources 
trumpet-tongued: "Enter not into the path 
of the wicked, and go not in the way of 
evil men. Avoid it, pass not by it, turn 
from it and pass away." 

There are thousands of young men in 
our land to-day who were brought up in 
religious homes, but who have now thrown 
off all religious restraint. Sometimes, when 
the finer chords of feeling are touched, 
memory will revert to those scenes of the 
old home life. Here is a picture that 
stands out with startling clearness when 
fond memory brings back the light of 
other days. There stands the old home- 
stead, in which childhood's happy days 
were spent. There are the trees, that 



THE COMPANION FOOL 101 

grew there, planted by loving hands long 
since crumbled back to dust; the flowers 
that bloomed by the window; the vines 
that climbed the wall; the brook that 
went babbling along through the meadow, 
beating out its merry music. There is the 
sitting room, where so many happy hours 
were spent in loving family companionship; 
the old family Bible, lying there upon the 
center table, with all the striking passages 
and the great promises marked in father's 
well-known and familiar hand, and the 
recollection of father leading in the morning 
family worship. There arises the vision 
of that beloved mother, now in the Father's 
house above, who taught the wayward boy, 
with clasped hands, to say, "Our Father, 
which art in heaven." Then there came 
that final morning for leaving the old 
home and all its precious associations. 
How mother's voice was so full of tears 
that she could not speak; how father's 
face twitched with the emotion that he 
could scarcely control; how his voice trem- 
bled, when he said: "God bless you, my 
boy! God bless you!" Ah! how remorse 



102 SIX FOOLS 

stings to the very depths of the soul when 
the promises are remembered, given then 
to father and to mother: never to touch 
the intoxicating cup, never to gamble, to 
avoid bad company, to read the Bible, to 
remember the Sabbath Day to keep it 
holy, and to attend the services of God's 
house — those promises broken again and 
again. How many young men there are 
to-day who have broken those sacred vows 
— vows given not only to Christian parents 
but vows given to God. 

A young prince, heir to the throne of 
Russia, gave himself over to a wild and 
dissolute life. Taking up his residence in 
Paris for a time, he went the rounds of 
dissipation. One evening as he was seated 
in a place of evil resort with a number 
of young profligates like himself, drinking, 
gambling, and making merry, a special 
messenger came to him and privately an- 
nounced to him that his father was dead. 
Pushing away from him the cards, the dice, 
and the wine cup, he rose up and said: 
"I am emperor. Henceforth I shall live 
as becometh the Czar of all the Russias. 



THE COMPANION FOOL 103 

I am through with these playthings, and 
I am through with you. Good night, 
gentlemen, and good-by forever." And he 
stuck to that resolution. God has en- 
dowed every one with a spiritual birth- 
right. Christ calls all to reign with him 
in his spiritual kingdom. "And I appoint 
unto you a kingdom as my Father hath 
appointed unto me." Man's highest am- 
bition should be to be worthy of such a 
princely heritage and to aspire to no 
meaner rank than to be "A king and a 
priest unto God." 



Ill 

THE WOMAN FOOL 



A man gains no possession better than a good 
woman, nothing more horrible than a bad one. — 
Simonides. 

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: 
God Almighty made 'em to match the men. 
— George Eliot (Mrs. Poyser, in Adam Bede). 

Himself half part of a blessed man, 

Left to be finished by such as she; 

And she a fair, divided excellence, 

Whose fullness of perfection is in him. 

Ah! two such silvered currents when they join, 

Do glorify the banks that bound them in. 

— Shakespeare. 



i 



Ill 

THE WOMAN FOOL 

Brought up in the worship of Baal, a 
god whose teachings are known to have 
given unquaHfied sanction to everything 
abandoned and vile, Jezebel, the Sidonian 
wife of Ahab King of Israel, was in char- 
acter in full keeping with her iniquitous 
creed. When a religion teaches immorality 
there are no depths of depravity to which 
the men and women who are its adherents 
may not go. Jezebel was adroit, able, and 
very clever, yet withal utterly unprincipled. 
Prepossessing and attractive in personal 
appearance, and giving great attention to 
external adornment, yet she was cunning 
and crafty, sly and deceitful, designing and 
treacherous. The young king, caught by 
the outward show and glitter, took the 
matrimonial step which proved his ruin. 
Jezebel formed the deliberate purpose of 
revolutionizing the faith of Israel and 

107 



108 SIX FOOLS 

substituting the worship of Baal for the 
worship of the true God. She secured her 
husband's permission to bring her idols 
into Israel, and there arose as if by magic 
upon almost every hilltop the images of 
her favorite god. She was also successful 
in winning the king over to idolatry, and 
Ahab, under the direction of his artful 
and wicked queen, built a magnificent 
ivory temple in Samaria, erecting upon it 
a colossal statue of the sun-god. She had 
all the priests of Jehovah, who stood in 
the way of her efforts to draw the people 
into the espousal of her idol- worship, put 
to death with the exception of one hundred, 
who were secretly hidden away by Obadiah, 
a good nian and the governor of the king's 
household. Thus her nefarious purposes 
were accomplished and Baal -worship be- 
came the recognized state religion. Out 
of the numerous hosts of Israel but seven 
thousand were found who did not bend 
the knee unto Baal. Jezebel issued a death 
warrant for Elijah after his signal victory 
on Mount Carmel, and he was compelled 
to flee for his life to a distant country. 



THE WOMAN FOOL 109 

In bringing about the death of Naboth 
and all his heirs, and making his estate 
confiscate to the crown, she secured pos- 
session of the parcel of ground which her 
husband had coveted. 

Ahab while standing within the desired 
vineyard and planning how he would lay- 
out this ill-gotten addition to his palace 
grounds suddenly and unexpectedly met 
the prophet, whom he had not seen for 
five years. Elijah stood there before him 
black-browed, motionless, grim, like an in- 
carnate conscience, as unearthly as if he 
were the ghost of the man whom he had 
murdered. Ahab's worthless and miserable 
subterfuges were swept away like chaff as 
he stood there cringing and melting under 
the piercing gaze of the blazing eyes of 
that man of God. He saw the enormity of 
the crime that he had committed, and his 
soul withered under the look of that iron 
prophet of the Lord as the sacrifice on 
Mount Carmel had shriveled under the 
fire from heaven. Trembling from head 
to foot, he gasped out, "Hast thou found 
me, O mine enemy .^" Elijah, with words 



110 SIX FOOLS 

that cut like a Damascus blade into the 
cowering, cowardly soul of the apostate 
king, then announced to him that his 
defection and crimes would be punished 
with the total destruction of his house. 
The dogs of the town would lick up his 
blood in the same place where they had 
licked up the blood of Naboth. Jezebel 
also would be dashed down from her 
high window, and her gore would splash 
the wall and redden the horses' hoofs. 
The dogs of the street would snarl over 
the horrid feast of her mangled body. All 
this fearful prophecy was fulfilled to the 
very letter. 

Ahab was fool enough to give his hand 
in marriage to a woman who without 
question was the worst female character 
mentioned in all sacred history. Surely, 
all unmarried young men, with the example 
of the wretched career of this ill-mated 
couple before them, should learn the folly 
of being allured by outw^ard glitter and 
show and beauty rather than by sterling 
worth of moral character. 

Inconsiderate and hasty marriages are 



THE WOMAN FOOL 111 

a prolific cause of domestic unhappiness. 
When young men and young women are 
thrown together how often they show 
themselves to be fools in forming their 
matrimonial alliances! How often impulse 
rules in making the life choice rather 
than sober judgment. He is drawn to her 
by her arch smile, by the elegant way she 
handles her fan and parasol, and the re- 
fined manner in which she passes around 
the ice cream at the picnic; while she is 
attracted to him by the style and color of 
his cravats, by the pattern and fit of his 
waistcoat, by the admirable shape of his 
shoes, and by the graceful manner in which 
he tips his hat. So they become engaged 
and in a few weeks are married, when he 
does not know any more about her real 
life and her adaptability to the idiosyn- 
crasies of his disposition than a native 
Patagonian does about chemistry; and she 
is as ignorant of his actual character as 
a Hottentot is of the Hebrew grammar. 

To marry a man who is not industrious 
and who is unsuccessful is to invite mis- 
fortune and calamity. A man ought to 



112 SIX FOOLS 

be fully persuaded of his ability to take 
care of a family before he plans to estab- 
lish a home. Yet a man who is in arrearages 
on his own board bill, who is everywhere 
recognized as being constitutionally tired, 
who is too lazy to earn his own living, 
and who has been trusted for the very 
suit of clothes that he wears upon his 
wedding day, will stand at the marriage 
altar, will place upon his bride's finger 
the betrothal ring, that has been bought 
on credit, and will solemnly say, "With 
this ring I thee wed and with my worldly 
goods I thee endow." 

Matrimonial alliances with men of large 
means are often arranged solely for the 
social position that wealth will bring. The 
hand of a young woman who is an heiress 
is often sought by one who shows in a 
few months after the marriage ceremony 
that he cares only for her bank account 
and nothing for her. To marry a man 
with a title does not necessarily mark an 
advance in position or in happiness; it 
often means wTctchedness and misery. You 
may place a decoration of nobility upon 



THE WOMAN FOOL 113 

a wooden dummy, but it still remains a 
wooden dummy. A count may be of no 
account, notwithstanding his pretentious 
title. 

Howells's A Modern Instance shows the 
evil results that come from an inconsider- 
ate and hasty marriage. A runaway match, 
the marriage of two persons who are not 
at all adapted to each other, and that ends 
at last in a divorce and in a broken heart 
and wrecked life for the woman, are the 
outline facts that the author uses for 
working out his powerful moral teaching, 
which drew from the editor of the Century 
Magazine the declaration upon his editorial 
page concerning this great novel: "Since 
Uncle Tom's Cabin no American work of 
fiction has appeared that has so strong 
and so wide a moral bearing and so great 
powers to affect public sentiment." 

Mutual incompatibility is one of the 
most serious causes of misery in modern 
home life. It is the gravest mistake for 
any young man and young woman to get 
married when they find out beforehand 
that they are not adapted to each other. 



114 SIX FOOLS 

A broken engagement is infinitely better 
than a broken life. 

Women often show themselves to be 
fools when they marry men for the purpose 
of reforming them. Such unions are an- 
other fruitful cause of infelicity in the 
marriage relation. It is almost always a 
fool's errand for the woman who thus 
marries, and it generally ends in the wreck 
of two lives instead of one. If a young 
man who has reached the age of twenty- 
five or thirty has gotten the drink habit 
really fixed upon him, unless by supreme 
effort of will and the help of divine grace 
he faces about, he is on his way to wreck 
and ruin as fast as the laws of moral 
deterioration can carry him. She is fully 
aware of the fact that he drinks. Every- 
body knows that he dissipates. Parents 
expostulate, neighbors and friends warn. 
But she gives no heed to their repeated 
admonitions. She is determined to marry 
him because she says she is going to re- ■• 

form him, and so another poor unfortunate 
goes to the altar of self-sacrifice. If every 
young man who is getting into the habit 



THE WOMAN FOOL 115 

of drinking were made aware that he 
could not get any decent and respectable 
young woman to pay any attention to him 
as long as he drinks, he would quit for 
good; and if every young woman whose 
affection is sought with a view to matri- 
mony by a young man who drinks, would 
say to him, "I will have nothing to do 
with you as long as you drink," she would 
be doing wonders in lessening the world's 
miseries, above all in diminishing the evils 
that come from divorce. 

The failure to live within the income is 
still another indictment that must be laid 
at the door of many a home where mar- 
ried life has been a failure. The woman 
fool in this case suggests and urges the 
purchase of some single expensive piece of 
furniture on the installment plan. This 
beautiful addition to the home furnishings 
makes many other things look shabby, 
which are soon replaced with other articles 
to correspond with that first costly pur- 
chase. So the debt is piled up until it 
gets entirely beyond reach. Receiving 
twelve hundred dollars a year and spending 



116 SIX FOOLS 

twelve hundred and fifty will soon bring 
a shadow over any home that follows that 
system of bookkeeping. It means always 
inability to meet obligations, dodging irate 
creditors, the loss of manliness and self- 
respect, and in many instances it has meant 
bankruptcy, dishonesty, crime, and a State's 
prison sentence. Better far a humble 
home in a one-story cottage on the plainest 
fare, all paid for, than life in a fine house 
splendidly furnished and supported by an 
outlay that fills life with unending per- 
plexities and ceaseless burdens. 

All too often we see the woman fool 
figuring in the divorce court. She had 
been brought up as one of the butterflies 
of society, pampered, petted, indulged with- 
out limit and hopelessly spoiled. She has 
a pretty face and a fine figure, but is 
inordinately vain. All her spare time is 
given to a study of the fashion plates, and 
to appear like them is her sole aim and 
desire. After a half dozen different engage- 
ments, which are made and broken so 
rapidly that she is scarcely able to keep 
track of them, she marries a good, honest 



THE WOMAN FOOL 117 

fellow, who finds himself utterly unable 
to gratify her extravagant tastes. After a 
few months of this union she wishes to 
secure a legal separation in order that she 
may marry some other man who will have 
the means with which to meet all her 
requirements. Her reasons for desiring the 
divorce are so trivial and frivolous that she 
cannot secure the necessary papers within 
the commonwealth where she lives, so she 
removes for a time to a State in which 
she can find a divorce law and a judge 
that are both broad enough to cover her 
case. Family instability is the most star- 
tling fact in American social life, and it is 
increasing at a rate that is unequaled in 
any other Christian nation. Statistics show 
that in this land one marriage in every ten 
ends in legal separation in the divorce 
court. One hundred years more of the 
same rapid increase of this social disease 
as has characterized the last twenty years 
and the nature of marriage will become 
completely transformed. If the present 
rate of increase of divorce continues un- 
checked, at the dawn of the twenty-first 



118 SIX FOOLS 

century many more marriages will termi- 
nate in this country by divorce than by 
death. A century is a long time in so 
young a nation as ours. But it is a much 
shorter period than the time it took for 
Rome to degenerate from the condition in 
which divorce was almost unknown to that 
in which divorces were so common that 
the sneer was repeatedly uttered that 
women no longer reckoned time by the 
calendar, by the number of consuls, who 
were elected every year, but by the number 
of their different husbands. Many a woman 
fool regards marriage as a contract, that 
is to be kept only so long as her husband 
continues to be perfectly agreeable to her 
and gives her an allowance that is suflBcient 
to meet all her demands. WTiat a travesty 
such a misinterpretation of the marriage 
obligation is upon the sacredness of that 
mutual relation into which two persons 
enter, when they take each other for better, 
for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness 
and in health, as long as life shall last, where 
love is the keynote and where trust, for- 
giveness, and helpfulness are the ever-ready 



THE WOMAN FOOL 119 

messengers to heal bruises and to reconcile 
all differences. If marriage is to degenerate 
into simply a contract between two persons, 
voidable upon every difference of whim or 
sentiment, where is the union that would 
endure? What would become of all the 
finer instincts of humanity which we gain 
from bearing and forbearing with each 
other's weaknesses? 

When God said, "It is not good that 
man should be alone," it was woman that 
he gave to him to be his companion. 
Whether marriage is to make or to mar 
a man depends so entirely upon the kind 
of a choice which he makes that he needs 
all the guidance that he can get. A rash 
step may mean the blighting of his whole 
life. But it is by no means necessary on 
that account to be so cautious as to dis- 
card the thought of matrimony altogether. 
A union that is not altogether ideal in its 
character is infinitely better for any young 
man than no marriage at all. 

Many a present-day home is happy 
through the union of many a modern Ruth 
and Boaz. A great multitude of twentieth- 



120 SIX FOOLS 

century Marys and Marthas are earnest 
and devoted followers of Christ. Any un- 
married young man in the matrimonial 
field is far more apt to get a Mary or 
Martha than he is to get a Jezebel, because 
the former class far outnumber the latter. 

Many a woman wise in counsel, clear 
in judgment, and possessed of that most 
uncommon of common things, common 
sense, who has never studied in a college, 
makes a most helpful life companion. To 
be the queen of a home it is not necessary 
that a woman should be a college graduate 
and able to talk different languages. Some 
women, when the occasion requires it, can 
talk more in one language than their hus- 
bands care to hear. 

Aristocratic family connections are not 
necessary to make a happy home. John 
B. Gough used to say that families who 
boast of their ancestry are like hills of 
potatoes — the best part of them are under 
ground. Wealth is not needed to make a 
little home cozy and comfortable. A few 
tasteful and inexpensive rugs, not from 
Persian looms but of American manufac- 



THE WOMAN FOOL 121 

ture, some pictures, some easy chairs, some 
books, papers, and magazines, and some 
kind of a musical instrument — these are 
within the reach of all; and these are suffi- 
cient in deft hands for making a home an 
earthly paradise. 

In some lands unillumined by the light 
of a Christian civilization a man wins his 
wife by his skill in the use of spear and 
club, by his prowess as a warrior. In some 
of the heathen countries wives are bought 
like cattle in the market. 

In other pagan nations the arrangements 
for marriage are carried on entirely by the 
parents, the young people often never meet- 
ing one another until they are brought 
together as husband and wife. Mutual 
tastes and adaptability are not in any way 
considered, love is an entirely unknown 
factor, and the woman is from the outset 
the abject slave of the man to whom she 
is joined. 

In Christian lands marriage is a joint 
contract, based supposedly upon a mutual 
love, in which the contracting parties 
pledge theraselves the one to the other 



122 SIX FOOLS 

to "love, comfort, honor, and keep, in 
sickness and in health, until death do them 
part." All this means a continuous unity 
of purpose, a loving reciprocity of thought 
and feeling, and a generous yielding of the 
one to the other in everything that per- 
tains to the highest interests of the family 
life. 

If not a state secret, it is surely a secret 
of the matrimonial state that a man does 
not mind being managed, provided the fact 
of the management is not rubbed in too 
often; and if he can only make himself 
think and believe that he is not being man- 
aged at all, his joy will be complete. Right 
here is where a woman's tact comes in. 
One of the most stubborn creatures on 
the face of this earth is a woman-driven 
man; and one of the meekest and most 
docile of subjects is that same man, woman- 
led, provided he does not know it. 

How much more tactful a woman usually 
is than a man in the management of the 
children in the home circle ! Francis Henry, 
aged ten, is told that he must not go 
skating. But he goes just the same, and 



THE WOMAN FOOL 123 

he comes home at night with unmistakable 
evidence of having been not only on the 
ice, but through it. The father comes 
down upon him, metaphorically speaking, 
like a pile driver. He does not reason 
with the boy. He punishes the lad and 
makes him angry, and the youngster goes 
out mad, slamming the door behind him. 
The punishment has not been reformatory, 
because it has awakened only the feeling 
of resentment. Then his mother takes 
Francis Henry on her lap to tell him how 
much they love him; how sorry they would 
have been if he had been drowned, and 
how lonely the house would have been 
without him. The little chap promises her, 
with tears running down his cheeks, that 
he will be obedient in the future. Through 
this interview with his mother he has 
received a lasting impression for good. 

Who can measure the power of a Christian 
mother in molding the characters of her 
children for righteousness and in giving 
them broader visions of life? 

John Wesley after he had entered Ox- 
ford University through frequent inter- 



124 



SIX FOOLS 



change of letters still kept in closest touch 
with his mother. The mother yonder in 
the Epworth rectory, burdened as she was 
with the many household cares and duties, 
still continued to wield the strongest possi- 
ble influence over her son at Oxford. He 
wrote long letters to his mother, telling 
her all about his doubts of the head and 
the heart, all about his theological diffi- 
culties; and most amazing it is that this 
woman, who never had had any theo- 
logical education or training, in her replies 
to the questions of this young Oxford 
student, went to the very heart of the 
difficulty. She produced answers that were 
remarkably clear and at the same time 
wonderfully full of common sense. No 
finer correspondence has ever been given 
to the world than these published letters 
that passed between John Wesley and his 
mother while he was a student at Oxford. 

Many a man immersed in business cares 
or in professional work has owed a large 
measure of his success to the keen insight 
of his wife. In the crucial tests of life it 
has often been found that what she knows 



THE WOMAN FOOL 125 

by intuition is of greater value than all 
his accumulated stores of wisdom and 
experience. Because she excels in intuition 
she frequently arrives at correct conclu- 
sions in a flash, while he reaches the same 
deductions much later because he travels 
on the lumbering stagecoach of logical 
processes. When great men depart, and 
the world comes to learn more intimately 
their personal histories, it is ofttimes found 
that the very source and mainspring of 
their lives have been the sympathy and 
help of their wives. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne never would have 
succeeded as he did without his wife. It 
was her faith in his latent powers, her 
sympathy and encouragement, that made 
him one of the great masters in our lit- 
erature. Whenever he was congratulated 
upon the astonishing success of his book 
The Scarlet Letter, he used to point to 
his wife and say, "The credit all belongs 
to her." 

One high in authority says that the word 
"wife" is derived from a word meaning 
to weave, so that the wife was and is the 



126 SIX FOOLS 

weaver of the household. In the earlier 
days much of the clothing was made at 
home. The wool after it was gathered 
was spun into the threads by the young 
unmarried girls of the family, who were 
called the spinners, from which we have 
the word ''spinster," a word which is now 
applied to any unmarried woman. The 
threads were then taken and woven into 
cloth by the mother of the girls, and 
hence she became the weaver, or the wife. 
Herein is a suggestion of the domestic 
qualities that should characterize a wife's 
life. Since the home is peculiarly and 
especially the domain of the wife, it fol- 
lows that she should be much within the 
home. It makes little difference whether 
that home be a four-room flat or a four- 
story mansion, it is the place where the 
wife should gather up and weave together 
all the threads that enter into the warp 
and woof of domestic life and happiness. 
Dickens, in his Bleak House, has pictured 
that type of the woman fool in Mrs. 
Jellyby, who is so greatly interested in 
outside philanthropic work that she cares 



THE WOMAN FOOL 127 

nothing for the interests of her home. 
Missions in Borrioboola-Gha claim all atten- 
tion, while the welfare of her children is 
utterly ignored and household affairs go to 
wreck and ruin. In all the larger problems 
of the home life the husband should share 
with his wife the responsibility for the 
proper rearing of the children. But it is 
neither just nor equitable that he should 
have the domestic duties of the home 
added to those of his shop or store or 
office. Much is being said in these times 
with regard to the "divided responsibility 
of the home." While it is all fair enough 
that there should be a certain dividing of 
the responsibility, when it comes to the 
conduct of the home and the rearing of 
the children there are certain responsibil- 
ities that the wife and mother should be 
able to assume without shifting them upon 
the shoulders of the husband and father. 
A vast deal of domestic unhappiness and 
much estrangement between husbands and 
wives have been owing to the way in which 
the wife was either unprepared or unwilling 
to meet what was evidently her rightful 



128 SIX FOOLS 

share of the simplest duties of the house- 
hold care and management. The restora- 
tion of true marriage would do more than 
any other one thing in bringing in the 
restoration of domestic happiness. True 
marriage is a union in which the two are 
so united that each cherishes for the other 
a stronger attachment than for any other 
human being; it is a union in which each 
shares with the whole heart in the other's 
weal or woe; it is a union which implies 
a unity of will and purpose in the work 
of life. Woman came into the world as 
the complement of man, and bringing that 
which man did not possess. He has his 
place while she has hers, and the two 
places are not interchangeable. Each has 
what the other has not, and each com- 
pletes the other. They are in nothing alike, 
and the happiness and perfection of both 
depend upon each asking and receiving 
from the other what the other only can 
give. Woman helps man by inspiring him 
constantly to great achievement, by the 
confidence which she breathes into him, 
and by the sympathy which she gives to 



THE WOMAN FOOL 129 

him. She helps him not so much by what 
she does herself as by what she inspires 
him to do. One of the great needs of our 
times is cultured, highly trained women in 
our homes. Women can have no nobler 
ambition than that of making a perfect 
home. Who that has read Dickens's David 
Copperfield does not recall those frequent 
conversations between David and his fool 
wife, in which he tries in vain to give her 
instruction in some of the simplest things 
in household management? Not a few men 
are married to women who not only have 
never learned to keep house but who have 
not the least desire to learn how. The 
only resort for such people is to find refuge 
in that asylum for domestic incapables and 
defectives — the boarding house. Mothers 
in good health who spend their lives in 
hotels and boarding houses to escape the 
responsibilities of housekeeping, and who 
allow their daughters to grow up in ignor- 
ance of the various branches of domestic 
science, stand out among the most con- 
spicuous fools of modern society. Girls 
whose training in household duties has been 



130 SIX FOOLS 

neglected are very apt after their marriage 
to flee to hotels or boarding houses in 
order that they may escape the legitimate 
penalties that come from such neglect. 
Every self-respecting woman should regard 
it as a most essential part of her education 
to know how to prepare and cook foods, for 
the food that we eat contains within it 
comeliness or deformity, health or disease, 
life or death. Bad cooking is frequently the 
unsuspected cause of intemperate habits, 
of shattered nerves, and many an aching 
heart, the insidious destroyer of many a 
home, inciting domestic discord, which re- 
sults in divorce. We welcome the new day 
that has dawned upon us when instruction 
is now given in many of our universities, 
colleges, and high schools in domestic 
science. We find provided in some of 
our most prominent institutions a four-year 
college course leading to the degree of 
Bachelor of Science in Home Economics, 
the entrance requirement to which is grad- 
uation from an accredited high school. 
The young women who are graduated in 
this course are fitted to become teachers of 



THE WOMAN FOOL 131 

domestic science and domestic art in high 
schools, to act as dietitians in hospitals, 
to do special work in food laboratories, not 
to say anything of the splendid equipment 
which they have for going into homes of 
their own as wives and mothers and home- 
makers. No girl should ever graduate in 
any high school without taking at least a 
portion of the course in domestic science. 
Surely, it is worth while for a girl to know 
something about the chemistry of foods, 
about their relative nutritive value, and 
about the best methods of cooking. It is 
to a girl's profit to know that lower-priced 
foods often contain just as much and even 
more nutrition than those higher priced, 
and that they can be made fully as appe- 
tizing for the table. It is to a girl's ad- 
vantage when she goes into a clothing 
or dry goods store by feeling of the 
textile fabrics and by looking at them to 
be able to tell whether they are wool or 
shoddy, and if they are part wool and 
part cotton to be able to tell about what 
proportion of wool and cotton is in them. 
It is to a girl's benefit to know how to 



132 SIX FOOLS 

cut out and to fit dresses, although she may 
never be called upon to make her own 
clothes; to know how to select her clothing 
material so that it shall properly blend 
together and shall harmonize with herself; 
to know how to fit up and to furnish a 
house so that when the task is completed 
the mural decorations, the rugs and other 
furnishings shall not be so out of color 
scheme that they will seem to be dis- 
cordant factions in everlasting warfare. 
All this knowledge now available for girls 
in high schools, that teach domestic sci- 
ence, will be of inestimable value to them 
in after life. 

While Jezebel stands as the extreme of 
wickedness among the women of the Bible, 
we have the highest and noblest types of 
womanhood as represented in Sarah, Ra- 
chel, Ruth, Hannah, Mary, and Priscilla. 
In all the pictures of Ruth that have been 
given to the world every artist's ideal has 
been as exquisitely featured as his skill 
could make it. But where has any Bible 
writer affirmed that Ruth was physically 
beautiful.^ The Word of inspiration says 



I 
a 



THE WOMAN FOOL 133 

of Sarah and Rebecca that they were 
"exceedingly fair." But we are nowhere 
told that Ruth had lovely features, a beau- 
tiful complexion, softly beaming eyes, or a 
graceful figure; yet these are all ascribed 
to her in all the portraits that hang in the 
world's art galleries. In literature this 
young widow stands as the very imper- 
sonation of the most charming type of 
physical womanhood; yet throughout her 
entire biography in the book that bears 
her name in the Bible there is not the 
slightest allusion to her personal appear- 
ance. Why, then, has the world proclaimed 
her as beautiful .^^ It is because of the 
exceeding beauty of her character, her 
kindness of heart, magnanimity of spirit, 
tranquillity of soul under trial, and the in- 
tensity of her affection for her friends, 
that the world has pronounced her lovely, 
without ever having raised the question as 
to what may be really learned about her 
looks. 

So it is always. The highest type of 
beauty is never merely physical. It is 
the outgleaming of internal virtues, the 



134 SIX FOOLS 

golden fruit that ripens from the sweet 
graces of character. 

The soul is better than its frame. 
The spirit than its temple. 

Where these moral and intellectual qual- 
ities exist in a woman's character they 
give such a glowing radiance to her life, 
such expressiveness to her face, that what- 
ever her physical appearance, she will be 
lovely in the eyes of all, and most beau- 
tiful to those who know her best. She 
has what will make her most attractive, 
when the brightness of her eye has been 
dimmed with sorrows, when the roses have 
faded from her cheeks, when the symmetry 
of her figure has gone. Real beauty, the 
kind of beauty that lasts, must always 
have back of it the reserve force of a 
generous heart and a noble soul. 

In the study of the philosophy of his- 
tory it will be seen that with the coming 
of every great crisis God has raised up a 
man equal to the emergency. What is 
true of man is equally true of woman. 
Woman may not have been so conspicuous 



THE WOMAN FOOL 135 

a figure, but she has been none the less 
important. 

In the days of good King Josiah, when 
the book of the law was found, the king 
did not consult with Jeremiah, who was 
then at the height of his fame, but he 
submitted the matter to Huldah, the 
prophetess, to procure an authoritative 
opinion upon it. 

WTien Samuel's mother consecrated her 
boy to the service of the Lord, she had 
no small part in determining the destiny 
of Israel. 

When the mother and grandmother of 
young Timothy instructed him in the 
Scriptures, they were factors in the estab- 
lishment of the apostolic church. 

In the life of the apostle Paul, when it 
was necessary that Apollos should be 
trained wisely for the ministry, that he 
should be taught the way of the Lord 
more perfectly, Paul did not hesitate to 
give him over to the supervision of a 
woman as well as a man, so that husband 
and wife joined together in assisting the 
young preacher in getting higher and 



136 SIX FOOLS 

broader conceptions of the religion that 
he had been set apart to proclaim among 
men. Priscilla understood theology so 
much better than Apollos that after she 
had heard this brilliant young Alexandrian 
preacher she took him and "expounded 
unto him the way of God more perfectly." 

The four daughters of Philip the evan- 
gelist were public teachers of divine truth. 

Paul speaks of Phoebe as the deaconess 
of the church at Cenchrea, and commends 
her most highly for the noble work that 
she accomplished. 

A number of the early church fathers, 
among whom Tertullian, Basil, and Chrys- 
ostom are most conspicuous, have written 
of these deaconesses and of their work. 
They were set apart by appropriate reli- 
gious ceremonies to look after the sick, to 
minister to imprisoned Christians, to do 
pastoral work, and to teach the catechism 
to baptized children. 

The General Conference of the Method- 
ist Episcopal Church thus has not only 
the clear scriptural authority, but the 
recognized custom of the apostolic church, 



THE WOMAN FOOL 137 

in setting apart the order of deaconesses 
for the work which they are so grandly 
doing in that denomination to-day. 

A large number of the churches of 
Protestantism would die if it were not 
for the noble women, who form the greater 
part of the congregations, sustain the 
prayer meetings, and bear the spiritual 
burdens. At a meeting of the Presbyterian 
General Assembly a few years ago, when 
the report on missions was read, announcing 
a large sum that had been received from 
men's estates through legacies, and another 
big amount was made known that had 
come from the Woman's Board of Mis- 
sions, some one at once moved to "extend 
a vote of thanks to the dead men and the 
live women of the Presbyterian Church." 
The phrase "dead men and live women" 
would well describe the spiritual life of 
many churches at the present time. 

So much is still being said about the 
natural feminine limitations that it seems 
to be necessary in some benighted local- 
ities to take up the argument that all 
women are not born natural fools. Our 



138 SIX FOOLS 

times are yet in part mediaeval in that 
woman is still seeking to secure equal 
wages with man, when she has shown her 
ability to do a given work as well as man, 
and in that there are withheld from her 
equal rights of suffrage because she is such 
an inferior being to man. 

All who attended the World's Fair 
in Chicago and visited the magnificent 
Woman's Building, the entire plans and 
specifications for which were drawn by 
a woman architect, Sophia G. Hayden of 
Boston, and who beheld that building 
filled as it was with the inventions, the 
works, and the achievements of women, all 
the wonderful products of woman's fertile 
brain, could not doubt her ability to fill 
the highest positions of honor and trust. 

The breadth of woman's influence is 
constantly widening, and the field of her 
activity is continually enlarging. Woman 
is the strongest social force of to-day. 
Life is her keyboard, and she may sweep 
it with a master's touch if she will. 

The pledge of woman's right to an equal 
place with man in the world's workshop 



THE WOMAN FOOL 139 

has been in Christianity from the begin- 
ning. It was abiding in the teachings of 
Jesus as well as in the whole spirit and 
philosophy of the New Testament through 
all the dreary years of the bondage of the 
Dark Ages. Christ treated women just as 
kindly and courteously as he did men, 
and in his conduct toward women he was 
immensely superior to his own age. The 
Jewish rabbis had a saying: "Let no man 
talk with a woman in the street; no, not 
even with his wife." But when the woman 
of Samaria came to Jacob's Well to draw 
water and found Christ resting there be- 
side it, he entered into a memorable con- 
versation with her as simply and as 
naturally as if she had been a man. When 
his disciples came back they were greatly 
astonished and marveled among themselves 
that he would condescend to talk thus 
intimately with a woman. Christ, through 
his attitude toward women, said at all 
times, '* Women are our equals and our 
sisters." The gradual unfolding of this 
principle of the right of woman to an 
equal place with man belonged to ''the 



140 SIX FOOLS 

greater things" that Christ declared were 
yet to come, when he ascended from OHvet. 

All doors are open to the woman of 
to-day. The only limitation is the limita- 
tion of individual capacity. 

Consider the foolish theory, that prevails 
in some quarters, that the only business 
of woman in life is marriage, and that the 
only training she needs is for matrimony. 
Most people have a general, vague con- 
ception that more girls are born into the 
world than boys. But this is not true, 
for statistics show that the birth rate of 
boys is in excess of that of girls. Accord- 
ing to a most reliable authority, statistics 
that have been taken from the great 
centers of population as far back as the 
days of Guizot and Buckle, and for at 
least seventy-five years in our own Amer- 
ican cities, show that there are born into 
the world one hundred and six boys to 
every one hundred girls. Yet there are 
many more women than men in the world 
for reasons that must be patent to all. 
Wars have swept away myriads of men, 
have desolated the world always, and will 



I 



THE WOMAN FOOL 141 

continue to do so for years to come. 
Drunkenness is peculiarly the vice of men, 
and, of course, destroys many more men 
than women. Men everywhere engage in 
the dangerous and extra-hazardous occupa- 
tions, which are attended by a much 
larger percentage of fatalities than those 
in which working women engage. All 
this causes the depreciation in the number 
of men, so that in Europe there is not a 
single nation that does not have in it more 
women than men. Since the women so 
far outnumber the men, the theory is 
neither rational nor tenable that a woman 
must be married to be useful to society. 
We may find in the records of state and 
church, of benevolent societies and of 
institutions of learning the names of some 
of the greatest women that have ever 
lived who have never married. What a 
noble volume could be written, narrating 
the magnificent achievements of some of 
the grand old maids of history! — Miriam, 
Queen Elizabeth, Florence Nightingale, 
Maria Mitchell, Mary Lyon, and Frances 
E. Willard. The world's history could 



142 SIX FOOLS 

not be written without large mention of 
what has been accomphshed by women 
who have never married. Many women 
have remained single, not because they 
never had opportunities for marriage, but 
because the opportunities were not of the 
right sort. Modestly conscious of their 
own merits, they would not give their 
consent to be joined to those who were 
not their equals. They have preferred to 
make the journey through life alone rather 
than to travel the road with the fraction 
of a man. In short, they have preferred 
single blessedness to double misery. So 
it is simply talking nonsense to say that 
the business of every woman is marriage, 
and that the woman who does not get 
married is a social failure. Society is 
guilty of grave neglect in the preparation 
of women for the future when it gives 
them no other training than to be capable 
wives, good mothers, and efficient house- 
keepers. Modern training for women must 
require far more than that. 

All girls, whatever their circumstances in 
life, should fit themselves for some definite 



I 



THE WOMAN FOOL 143 

calling. This is necessary for some, and 
surely prudential for all. Even the girl 
who is reared in the home of luxury should 
fit herself for making her own living. 
She may never need to earn her own way, 
but she should learn how to work. She 
requires the discipline of labor, and she 
also ought not to be deprived of the pos- 
itive pleasure that there is in work. What 
misery is so intolerable as that which arises 
from ennui superinduced by idleness.^ 
What joy is so keen as that which springs 
from the consciousness that one is doing 
something in the world worth while .^^ 

That notion that it is degrading for a 
young woman to engage in honest toil is 
gone forever. The girls who make them- 
selves independent by preparing to earn 
their own living are the ones who really 
deserve to be honored. They are the ones 
for whom a safe and secure future can 
nearly always be predicted. Our own land 
is rapidly adjusting itself to the new 
demands and changed requirements for 
women. 

Harriet Martineau, after her visit to 



144 SIX FOOLS 

America in 1832, related that she found 
but seven employments open to women: 
teaching, needlework and keeping boarders, 
working in cotton mills, working in book 
binderies, type-setting, and household ser- 
vice. According to a recent report of the 
chief of the National Bureau of the Sta- 
tistics of Labor there are now more than 
four hundred remunerative occupations 
open to women. 

An unreasoning prejudice has in the past 
often barred the way against the entrance 
of women into the professions and occu- 
pations which she now so highly honors. 

In 1840, with the single exception of 
Oberlin, there was not one college that 
was open to women in the United States. 
Now there are more than two hundred 
universities and colleges, of all grades in 
this land, that are open to women. The 
first woman who was regularly graduated 
from a medical college was Elizabeth Black- 
well, who received the degree of Doctor 
of Medicine from the Medical College at 
Geneva, New York, in 1849. The faculty 
referred the matter of her admission to 



THE WOMAN FOOL 145 

the students, who took it as a great joke 
and voted unanimously in favor of her 
admission to the institution. The an- 
nouncement of the vote was received with 
uproarious demonstrations. The faculty re- 
luctantly accepted the decision of the 
students, for they had expected an entirely 
different outcome from their ballot. Dr. 
Blackwell was compelled to go abroad for 
her clinical study. She was received at 
the Maternite in Paris with great difficulty, 
and as a personal favor she was allowed 
some privileges in the way of visiting 
hospitals. When she returned from Europe 
she set to work to provide opportunities 
of clinical study for women. She estab- 
lished, with the assistance of generous 
friends, the New York Infirmary for women 
and children, and from this there grew the 
Woman's Medical College of New York. 

Now women physicians are numbered 
in the United States by the thousands. 
They are welcomed everywhere in hos- 
pitals, in private families, in the columns 
of medical journals, and are invited to 
consultations. They are successful medical 



146 SIX FOOLS 

lecturers and are members of county, State, 
and national medical associations. 

Women are now admitted to practice 
law before the Supreme Court of the United 
States, who have been members of the 
bar of the highest court of any State for 
three years. 

The Methodist, Unitarian, Universalist, 
Disciple, and Free Baptist denominations 
now admit women to their theological 
schools; and all these denominations named 
ordain women to the ministry, except the 
Methodist. 

Women have developed a capacity for 
public affairs which receives large recog- 
nition at the present time. Among many 
other employments now open to them they 
are elected or appointed to such offices as 
county clerk, register of deeds, pension 
agent, prison commissioner. State librarian, 
overseer of the poor, school superintend- 
ent, and school supervisor. They serve 
as executors and administrators of estates, 
as trustees and guardians of property, 
trusts, and children. They fill positions 
as engrossing clerks of State legislatures, 



THE WOMAN FOOL 147 

as superintendents of women's State pris- 
ons, as college presidents and professors, as 
members of boards of State charities, 
lunacy and correction, as police matrons 
and postmistresses. Women are now ac- 
countants and pharmacists, cashiers and 
telegraphers, stenographers and typewriters, 
dentists and bookkeepers, authors and lec- 
turers, journalists and painters, architects 
and sculptors. In all these positions they 
have shown themselves to be fully as 
capable as men. 

In all occupations in which women have 
shown themselves to be able to do the 
work as well as men they should receive 
equal wages. Some excellent people are 
unnecessarily alarmed over what they term 
the danger which threatens our American 
women on account of their admission into 
nearly all lines of business and professional 
work. Some women are silly and want 
to be mannish, just as some men are fools 
and want to be dudes. But to the average 
man education, freedom to do and to dare, 
and the sense of responsibility make him 
only a manlier man; and such will be the 



148 e SIX FOOLS 

effect upon womanhood. She will become 
more completely and wholesomely a woman 
as she has unfettered opportunity for the 
development of body, mind, and soul. 

Another evidence that medisevalism still 
survives in our present-day life is found 
in the claim often made that woman should 
be kept out of politics, because as man's 
inferior she is not capable of understanding 
the problems of politics. How can woman 
be kept out of politics, when she has always 
been in politics? Jochebed, when she con- 
structed the tiny ark of bulrushes, making 
it water-proof and placing her infant son 
therein and laying it in the flags by the 
river's brink, took part in politics. Miriam, 
when she stood guard not far away from 
her little brother upon the banks of the 
Nile and secured her own mother as his 
nurse and teacher, having him conveyed to 
his own home, where he was instructed 
in all the great principles of the Hebrew 
faith, took part in politics. Thermuthis, 
Pharaoh's daughter, when, in direct opposi- 
tion to the edict of her own father, she 
spared the life of the infant Moses, adopted 



THE WOMAN FOOL 149 

him into the royal household, and had him 
trained in all the learning of the Egyptians, 
took part in politics. Bertha, the wife of 
King ^thelbert, when she persuaded her 
husband to listen to the Christian mission- 
aries that had been sent out by Gregory 
the Great, and thus opened the way for 
the establishment of the Christian faith 
upon the soil of Great Britain, took part 
in politics. Joan of Arc, when she awoke 
the French nation into a new life and 
aroused a spirit of burning patriotism which 
enabled her to lead the French forces 
most successfully against their enemies, 
took part in politics. Jenny Geddes, when 
she arose in the Saint Giles Church in 
Edinburgh and started a riot by throwing 
her stool at the head of the dean, who was 
seeking to force the people to adopt a 
liturgy to which they were most strongly 
opposed, took part in politics. Elizabeth 
Fry, when she inaugurated that mighty 
reform movement in the sanitary condition 
of prisoners and in the treatment of indi- 
vidual prisoners which was felt all over 
Europe, took part in politics. Harriet 



150 SIX FOOLS 

Beecher Stowe, when she wrote Uncle 
Tom's Cabin, a book which created a wave 
of pubHc sentiment against slavery that 
swept this land from ocean to ocean, and 
that did more to overthrow slavery than 
all the work of both houses of Congress 
combined, took part in politics. Keep 
woman out of politics? As well try to 
keep the stars out of the sky. 

Justice demands that woman should have 
the ballot. With the ballot woman be- 
comes more truly the helpmeet of man. 
Taxation without representation made a 
revolution in this country nearly a century 
and a half ago; and yet we submit to this 
injustice in the treatment of women with- 
out a protest. 

Napoleon asked of Madame de Stael, 
"What makes you women meddle with 
politics?" 

''Ah, sire," she replied, "so long as you 
will hang us, we must ask the reason." 

A woman who was asked, "Who will take 
care of the children while you go to the 
polls?" answered, "The same one who takes 
care of them when I go to pay my taxes." 



THE WOMAN FOOL 151 

No one will deny that, physically, men- 
tally, and morally, woman deserves the 
ballot. There are those who claim that 
the home is the unit of society and that 
it is large enough as woman's sphere, and 
who contend that woman, if she has the 
ballot, must be prepared to bear arms in 
defense of it. 

Horace Greeley was once having a dis- 
cussion with Elizabeth Cady Stanton upon 
the subject of woman suffrage, and he said 
to her: "What would you do in time of war 
if you had woman suffrage, Mrs. Stanton?" 

"Just what you did during the Civil 
War, Mr. Greeley," was the instant re- 
joinder. *T would stay at home and urge 
others to go and fight." 

The anti-woman suffragists forget that 
woman with the ballot may still be in the 
home sphere, for she can still protect the 
home by voting; and that as man's helper 
she is able to defend the ballot. What 
he does upon the battlefield she can do 
among the wounded in the hospital; her 
work in helping is fully as important as 
man's work in fighting. 



152 SIX FOOLS 

Every vice, every most deadly evil seems 
to rest at last its greatest burden of sorrow 
and of woe on woman. As we look into 
history we find that she has been the 
greatest sufferer. She suffers most from 
the degradation of irreligion and infidelity, M 

from the curse of drink, and from the evil 
of social impurity, and when she becomes 
personally depraved she sinks lower and 
becomes more degraded than man. Yet 
woman's intuitions are much quicker than 
man's intuitions. Gifted with a keener 
natural discernment, she gets more com- 
fort out of religion and dispenses more of 
its gentle spirit. The time is coming when, 
standing upon the platform of equal rights 
with man, she will be able to wield a 
still larger influence for good. 



I 



IV 
THE RICH FOOL 



1 



Thus we play the fool with the time; and the 
spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us. 
— Shakespeare. 

Though we travel the world over to find the 
beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it 
not. — Emerson. 



If a man empties his purse into his head, no 
one can take it from him. An investment in 
knowledge pays the best interest. — Franklin. 



IV 

THE RICH FOOL 

Christ reenforces the lesson of steward- 
ship so clearly taught in the Old Testament, 
and brings it to a focus in his parable of 
the foolish rich man. Far from regarding 
himself as a steward of the manifold grace 
of God, this man completely ignored his 
responsibility to the Father Almighty in 
the matter of his possessions. He speaks 
of "my fruits" and "my goods," and is 
described by Christ as laying up treasure 
for himself, looking upon all the increase 
of his fields as exclusively his own. Feel- 
ing the need of larger accommodations for 
the rich yield from his land, and determin- 
ing to pull down his barns and build 
greater, he looked forward to this desired 
end as if it had already been accomplished, 
and rejoiced in anticipation over the good 
time that he would have. But the decree 
came forth from the Eternal at the very 

155 



156 SIX FOOLS 

time when he was gleefully calculating on 
this future enjoyment: "Thou fool, this 
night thy soul shall be required of thee. 
Then whose shall those things be, which 
thou hast provided?" That is the simple 
story as Christ gives it, and this is the 
moral which he adds to it: "So," that is 
such a fool, so great a fool, "is he that 
layeth up treasure for himself and is not 
rich toward God." 

If the scriptural doctrine of stewardship 
were universally acted upon by those who 
are possessed of property, the theory of 
communism would cease to exist. The com- 
munist says to the capitalist: "You have 
no right to hold your property. It is not 
yours. It belongs to me and to others. 
It should be divided up, and we should all 
share alike. If you do not divide your 
property, I will come and take it by force." 
That is robbery. But the Christian says: 
"My property belongs to God. I am God's 
steward. He has given me my property 
to use for him, and I will use it under his 
direction for the good of others." That is 
stewardship. We would find in this right- 



THE RICH FOOL 157 

ful exercise of Christian stewardship the 
antidote for many of the troubles that 
are agitating the labor world at the present 
time. 

In this age of intense commercialism it 
would seem that all classes are following 
lago's advice to Roderigo — "Put money in 
thy purse." Roderigo had fallen in love 
with Desdemona, but the maiden had 
chosen to bestow her affections in another 
direction. Roderigo was passing through 
that stage of experience, which most men 
pass through in their youth, when he felt 
that life was not worth living without the 
object of his affections to share it with 
him. The sun would shine in vain without 
her smiles. No flower would have any 
perfume if it could not be plucked and worn 
upon her breast. So he went to lago in 
his despondency, and said, 'T will incon- 
tinently drown myself." 

lago replied: "Ere I would say I would 
drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen, 
I would change my humanity with a 
baboon. Come, be a man: drown thyself? 
Drown cats and blind puppies. I profess 



158 SIX FOOLS 

me thy friend, and I confess me knit to 
thy deserving with cables of perdurable 
toughness; I could never better stead thee 
than now. Put money in thy purse; follow 
these wars; defeat thy favor with an 
usurped beard; I say, put money in thy 
purse. It cannot be that Desdemona should 
long continue her love to the Moor — ^put 
money in thy purse — nor he his to her: 
it was a violent commencement, and thou 
shalt see an answerable sequestration — ^put 
but money in thy purse. These Moors 
are changeable in their wills — fill thy purse 
with money. If thou wilt needs damn 
thyself, do it in a more delicate way than 
drowning. Make all the money thou 
canst." 

All this advice was the counsel of a false 
friend, the admonition of a traitor to all 
virtue and honesty, the recommendation 
of an arch conspirator and companion in 
treachery to Judas Iscariot. Nevertheless, 
the advice, *Tut money in thy purse," is 
very pertinent and of great value. No man 
can get through this life as he ought to 
without having some money in his purse. 



THE RICH FOOL 159 

Money is the circulating medium of any 
country. Its existence in some form is 
necessary for purposes of traffic and trade. 
It is indispensable in effecting sales and 
making purchases. All nations, both civil- 
ized and savage, have striven to make 
some convenient form of currency. That 
word "currency" is derived from the Latin 
cur ere, "to run," which no doubt accounts 
for the remarkable rapidity with which it 
slips through a man's fingers. 

As far back as we go in history we find 
Abraham with his shekels, bartering with 
silver and gold. Coins are in existence 
more than three thousand years old, but 
none can tell who made or stamped the 
first coin. In ancient Sparta iron was used 
as money. A Spartan lady, when she 
went shopping, would have needed a slave 
and an ox cart to carry her necessary cash. 
Lycurgus was a wise man, and in the use 
of his iron money was prompted by the 
double purpose to keep the Spartans at 
home, for that kind of money would be 
absolutely worthless in any place outside 
of Sparta, and to keep them from being 



160 SIX FOOLS 

corrupted by foreign manners. In the time 
of Numa Pompilius, the second king of 
Rome, seven hundred years before Christ, 
stamped leather was used, from which the 
word pecunia is derived. From this word 
there comes that elegant phraseology, which 
we use when a man is hard up, and we 
say he is exceedingly impecunious. In 
Hindoostan, they used cowries or shells as 
a medium of exchange. From this use of 
shells for money there has come our com- 
mon, everyday phrase, "to shell out." In 
the earlier days of American history a great 
deal of tobacco was used for money; times 
have now so changed that a great deal 
of money is used for tobacco. About the 
middle of the seventeenth century the then 
new colony of Virginia prescribed the quality 
and the quantity of tobacco that should 
circulate as money. 

Our Puritan ancestors were very good 
men, but they were not without their 
human failings. This is seen in the early 
laws that were enacted against the abuse 
of money. It is a noteworthy fact that 
every silver coin has a raised ring around 



THE RICH FOOL 161 

its outer edge; but silver coins were first 
made without these raised rings, until a 
law was passed that they should be so 
manufactured. Only a single generation 
after the landing of the Pilgrims, it 
was found necessary to pass a law pro- 
hibiting the clipping of coin. As this 
law proved ineffective, they put a raised 
ring around the edge of the coin, and de- 
clared that no coin would be valid or pass 
current when its ring was cut away. 

A certain woman confounded the New 
England community in which she lived 
more than two centuries ago, and after the 
time that the law just referred to was 
passed. Her husband kept a tollgate; and 
although they were poor people, yet it 
was soon noticed that his wife had secured 
the necessary means somewhere with which 
to purchase for herself a set of table silver. 
The women of this Massachusetts town at 
once set themselves to work at the arduous 
but agreeable task of finding out where and 
how this woman got her silver. Did any- 
one ever yet discover a company of women 
who were not equal to a self-imposed duty 



162 SIX FOOLS 

of this kind? They were, of course, success- 
ful, and they discovered that of all silver 
coins which passed into and through the 
hands of the gatekeeper as toll-money, 
that although no coin was clipped upon 
the edges, yet there was a hole in the 
center of each coin. The keeper of the toll- 
gate had invented a machine that punched 
a hole in each coin. "Many a mickle 
makes a muckle," and as they carefully 
saved all the little pieces of silver that 
were punched out, it was not long until 
his wife had her silverware. So a new 
law had to be passed in Massachusetts 
against punching holes in coins. 

Not a single word can be found in the 
Bible against money. The Old Testament 
says, "Money answereth all things." Our 
Lord wrought a miracle to secure a piece 
of money with which to pay his taxes. 
He appointed Judas as the treasurer of 
the band of the disciples. Judas, it is true, 
was a type of the modern recreant Chris- 
tian defaulter. Nevertheless, he was ap- 
pointed to take charge of the funds with 
the consent of our Lord. 



THE RICH FOOL 168 

What is condemned in the Bible is the 
love of money. It is "the love of money" 
which **is the root of all evil." It is not 
a sin for a man to get rich, if he can do 
it honestly. It is not wrong for a man to 
acquire wealth, if he spend his money wisely 
and generously for charitable and benev- 
olent purposes after he has gotten it 
together. But it is the narrow, selfish, and 
sordid aggrandizement of wealth; it is the 
idolatrous worship of the mighty dollar 
that came under the just condemnation of 
Christ. 

If those who give vent to fierce philip- 
pics upon money, who indulge in indis- 
criminate condemnation of money and all 
money-getting, were really taken at their 
own suggestion, they would soon reverse 
their judgments. If men should really 
cease to strive for money, these alarmists 
would become at length dismayed at the 
success of their own experiment. They 
would hasten, after a time, to rekindle the 
ambition for the acquisition of money. 
The desire for the attainment of wealth 
is one of the mighty factors in speeding 



164 SIX FOOLS 

forward the wheels of the world's thought 
and activities. 

It was the money advanced by Queen 
Isabella of Spain that fitted out the three 
little ships of Columbus with which he 
made his voyage of discovery to this 
Western world. It was the money ad- 
vanced by the crowned heads of Europe 
that fitted out expedition after expedition 
to this newly discovered continent, and 
that enabled the leaders of these expedi- 
tions to continue their researches and 
explorations, until the world came to know 
the richness and vastness of this new 
western hemisphere. It was the seven 
million two hundred thousand dollars in 
gold, given by the United States in 1867, 
that purchased from Russia our territory 
of Alaska. The desirability of the pur- 
chase having been strongly championed by 
William H. Seward, then Secretary of 
State, the papers sneeringly referred to it 
as ''Seward's Folly" and characterized it as 
the purchase of icebergs and sea lions. 
The payment of such a great sum at a 
time when, immediately following our Civil 



THE RICH FOOL 165 

War, our national debt loomed so large 
struck the average citizen as a piece of 
the most stupendous folly. But we have 
found wonderful resources in Alaska, in 
the fishing and mining interests, and in 
the export of seal furs, that have all been 
developed since it became a part of our 
national domain. That little investment 
of ours in the Northwest is now paying 
in its annual commerce more every year 
than its original purchase money. "Sew- 
ard's Folly" was one of the best bargains 
Uncle Sam ever made. 

This desire for the acquisition of wealth 
has also been one of the mighty factors 
in the material development of our great 
national resources. It has brought the 
virgin prairies under cultivation and has 
drained our marshes, bringing new large 
areas of richest soil under the plow and 
the harrow. It has made millions of acres 
of our land wave with the golden glory 
of the abundant harvests. It has tunneled 
our mountains and has spanned our largest 
rivers. It has interwoven the network of 
steel bands across the continent and has 



166 SIX FOOLS 

dotted the seas of earth with the countless 
sails of commerce. It has built our large 
cities, and has caused a nation here to 
spring into life — great, prosperous, and free. 
It is to the best interests of all men that 
there should be printing presses for the 
dissemination of good literature; that there 
should be Christian churches. Christian 
colleges and universities, mission stations, 
hospitals, asylums for the insane, and 
schools for the blind, deaf, and dumb; 
and that we should have all the mag- 
nificent machinery of our modern Christian 
civilization. It takes money to run all 
these things. Man wants the freedom of 
religion and the freedom of thought. He 
wants all the best things that belong to 
an advanced intellectual culture, all the 
great ideas that books can give to him. 
It requires money to procure all these 
things. It is the rich man's steamships 
that bear the missionaries over the sea to 
the heathen. It is the rich man's rail- 
roads that transport the servants of the 
Lord from city to city, from village to vil- 
lage, and from church to church, with 



THE RICH FOOL 167 

amazing promptness and velocity. Hos- 
pitals and homes for the aged, asylums 
and countless charities flourish, vitalized 
and fertilized by the gold of wealthy men 
and women. 

In view of the great good that is being 
done in this world by those who are called 
rich, we have no right to condemn indis- 
criminately all wealth and all wealth- 
getting. We have many thoroughly con- 
secrated men and women to whom God 
has given great wealth who regard them- 
selves as stewards of his manifold mercies 
to disburse the funds which they regard as 
a sacred trust. When we look at the 
matter of our national wealth the question 
comes to us freighted with tremendous 
responsibilities. It is the field of marvel- 
ous mercantile and manufacturing estab- 
lishments. It is the prolific source of 
products that are at once amazing and 
almost infinite in their variety. It is the 
organized skill and intelligence which have 
spelled out the secrets of nature and have 
won her to the service of humanity. The 
dreams of former generations seem at last 



168 SIX FOOLS 

about to be realized. The dominion of 
man over the forces of nature is appar- 
ently upon the eve of being trimnphantly 
crowned. 

Such wealth as that which we possess 
as a nation is phenomenal; and it has been 
largely the creation of only a few decades 
of production, while the resources of Europe 
represent the growth of centuries. And 
yet we are only just beginning to develop 
our vast agricultural areas, our mines, our 
railroad systems, our oil and gas wells, 
and our manufacturing plants, with their 
endless variety in machinery and product. 

Wealth has great malevolent as well as 
benevolent possibilities. It can stand in 
the pathway of the municipal and the 
civil good. It can be used to corrupt 
juries and lawyers and to bribe lawmakers. 
It can pervert local and national legis- 
lation, buy votes, debauch the community 
and corporation conscience, and make men 
grossly material in their daily lives. 

We behold to-day the vast concentra- 
tion of wealth in the hands of the com- 
paratively few, and the still vaster con- 



THE RICH FOOL 169 

centration of production and transportation 
in the hands of powerful syndicates. We 
have the bilHon-dollar trust now, and other 
mergers and combines that are almost as 
large. The multimillionaire of to-day bids 
fair soon to be surpassed by the billionaire 
of to-morrow. This concentration, this 
organization of capital on the one side is 
driving labor to such a completeness of 
organization as the world has never known 
before. We find in these days of social 
unrest that a cheap and perishing notoriety 
can easily be gained by a leader who in 
times of conflict between capital and labor 
loudly champions the cause of belligerent 
labor unions and striking rioters. But all 
these debated questions belong to the 
calmer judgment of our republic as a whole, 
and they should be settled, not in the 
interests of one section, but in the interests 
of the entire country. We may freely 
grant that under the craze of a fierce 
commercial competition capital may have 
bought men body and soul; but even then 
labor has no right to stride forward to 
the throne of dominion, over the prostrate 



170 SIX FOOLS 

forms of workingmen who have been 
maimed or killed for working in opposi- 
tion to the orders of labor unions. 

All money-getting should be regarded 
only as a means to the attainment of the 
highest and noblest ends of life. A man's 
real worth is his soul- worth. But in the 
life of our times the mind is not always 
made the measure of the man. Real 
worth and soul -worth are not always ac- 
cepted as synonyms. In market listings 
moral values are often subjected to heavy 
discounts. When anyone comes up for 
discussion in business or social circles the 
most of people ask, "How much is he 
worth?" What do they mean by that 
question? Do they mean how many broad 
fields of the mind's possession? Do they 
mean how many bonded securities have 
been laid away in the bank of the soul 
for the world that is to come? Do they 
mean how many splendid treasures of a 
noble character have been accumulated as 
reserve fund for that endless future life? 
No; not at all. They mean how much 
is he worth in the listing that always ap- 



THE RICH FOOL 171 

pears largest when a man takes the private 
mental inventory of what he has, and that 
dwindles almost to the vanishing point 
when the appraiser comes around. How 
much is he worth in dollars and cents, in 
houses and lands, in stocks and bonds, 
in gilt-edged mortgages and first-class secur- 
ities upon real estate? 

One of Chicago's multimillionaires used 
to be heard by his servants as he tossed 
night after night on his bed, saying, ''O 
God! I wonder when it will be morning." 
The next morning that man might have 
commanded twenty millions of dollars, but 
he was a veritable pauper in spirit. He 
had the eyes and the feelings of a hawk, 
and was ever ready to pounce on any- 
thing that promised to yield back money 
to his beak and claws. He was sagacious 
and shrewd and cunning about money 
matters up to the very last; but he was 
a poverty-stricken wretch in all that peace 
and comfort and happiness which money 
is supposed to bring. He loved nobody, 
and nobody loved him. He went about 
gritting his teeth, when he remembered 



172 SIX FOOLS 

how his heirs were cursing and swearing 
because he lived so long. His heart was 
a perfect desert, utterly barren in every- 
thing that makes life worth the living. 

One of our American men of wealth, 
who was worth one hundred millions of 
dollars, came to his death by slow starva- 
tion. He was utterly unable to digest any 
solid food for months before his death. 
He gave great feasts, yet he was not able 
to taste any of the delicacies himself. He 
gave a lavish entertainment on his yacht 
to some of the most noted members of 
the English nobility only a little while 
before he died. The banquet was spread 
in the dining room, a room as beautiful as 
an apartment in a king's palace. The 
table was a mass of glittering plate and 
exquisite china, cut glass, and rare flowers. 
The servants were bustling about here and 
there putting the final touches to the 
sumptuous board, when suddenly there tot- 
tered feebly into the room, attended by 
his valet, the wraith of the master of all 
this opulence and luxury. He surveyed 
the table with his pathetic eyes, and then 



THE RICH FOOL 173 

feebly said, "What does all this lay-out 
amount to, when any street beggar enjoys 
more of life than I do?" 

Many a man who has gone to the far 
West, and who has struggled to amass the 
large fortune which he has at last ac- 
quired, has supposed that after he has 
gotten his wealth together he would be 
able to buy with it perfect peace and 
happiness. To this end he has removed 
to some great city, built a palatial home 
on a fashionable avenue, and has gotten 
into society life. But he has found that 
shall and receptions bore him, that late 
dinners do not agree either with his head 
or stomach, and that the sort of life which 
he thought would contain for him such a 
store of pleasure has in it no pleasure at all. 

A certain copper king had removed to a 
metropolitan center with all his millions 
and found the rounds of life upon which 
he had entered most distasteful and bur- 
densome. He was visited in his beautiful 
home by his old mine partner from the 
West, who said to him, after having been 
conducted all over his magnificent mansion: 



174 SIX FOOLS 

"Well, Tom, you surely cannot say you 
haven't everything that you want?" 

"Yes," was the quick retort, "there is 
one thing I haven't got that I do want. 
I want a parrot to hang up in a cage in 
my front hallway, that has been trained 
to say every time he sees me enter the 
door, 'Here comes the old fool again.'" 

So when we ask the question, "What 
is a man worth .^" we observe that there 
is a great deal more that enters into the 
answer to that question than the enumera- 
tion of real estate and mortgages, of secur- 
ities and dollars in the bank. Whenever 
a business man dies all who have known 
him in a business way at once set to work 
to reckon up his profits and losses, to 
balance his books of life, and to ask, 
"What was the man worth?" The answer 
comes in stocks and bonds, in houses and 
lots, and the general public is satisfied 
with that sort of an answer. But the 
friends of his heart, who stand around his 
casket, do not reckon it that way. They 
search their memories for every kind action, 
for every good deed, for every loving thing 



THE RICH FOOL 175 

that they have ever known him to do. 
They garner every noble sentiment that 
they have heard him utter and treasure 
every high aspiration and lofty purpose 
that they have known him to cherish. 
These are the riches that are regarded as 
of the highest worth in that sad hour by 
the friends of his heart. These riches are 
the exponents of the soul-life. They show 
the spiritual manhood that had been at- 
tained, the stock of noble character that 
had been acquired. When at such times 
we ask, "What is a man worth .^" God 
answers, "Man's greatest worth is in the 
possession of a pure and noble character." 
It has come to be among the highest 
encomiums that can be uttered to have 
it said at the decease of any public man, 
when it can be honestly said of him, "He 
died poor." Emphasis was given to this 
fact in the tributes that were given to 
the life and character of Senator John A. 
Logan. One of our leading American news- 
papers said concerning him: "During his 
long public career his personal integrity 
was never questioned. He never derived 



176 SIX FOOLS 

private profit from the opportunities of 
public place." All alike, friend and foe, 
gave willing assent to the truthfulness of 
that statement. That old adage, which is 
of the highest authority, gains only in 
luster with the passage of the years: "A 
good name is rather to be chosen than 
great riches." 

It is often the case that more civility 
is shown to rascality in broadcloth than to 
a hero in rags. Currency, like charity, 
often covers a multitude of sins. It is 
better than oxalic acid for taking stains 
out of character. It is the best of all 
disinfectants for destroying disagreeable 
odors. 

In Baltimore one man said to another, 
meeting him upon the street Monday, 
"Why did you take that nigger into 
your pew with you yesterday morning at 
church .f^" 

The man replied, **He is a gentleman 
from Hayti." 

*'I don't care from what place he comes, 
he is nothing but a nigger." 

"But he is a friend of mine whom I 



THE RICH FOOL 177 

esteem very highly. I have corresponded 
with him for several years. He is finely 
educated, a graduate of Harvard, and spent 
a year in travel and study abroad." 

"I don't care; he is only a nigger, and 
you had no business to bring him into 
your pew at our church." 

"But he is worth a million of dollars." 

"Worth a million of dollars! You don't 
say! Give me an introduction to him." 

We have everywhere a class of men, 
yeomen tried and true, who will not bow 
down in servile humility before the altar of 
the mighty dollar; who always revere gen- 
uine soul -worth whenever they see it; who 
always honor noble character, although they 
may see it clad in patched garments and 
dwelling in humble cottages; who will 
recognize no aristocracy but that of heart 
and brains, of moral worth and intellectual 
power. We meet now and then with men 
of wealth who have gotten together all 
their riches wrongfully and fraudulently; 
whose lives are deeply stained with open 
sin; who have coined their money from 
tears and blood; who have devoured wid- 



178 SIX FOOLS 

ows' houses and are rolling to-day in their 
ill-gotten wealth, scarcely a penny of which 
has come to them fairly or equitably. Let 
those who will bow down in cringing, fawn- 
ing subservience before such idols and 
worship such dishonestly and dishonorably 
acquired wealth. But we still have Morde- 
cais, who remain immoved at the king's 
gate, despising such ill-gotten gain and 
the man who has gotten it together. 

Money cannot buy for us the capacity 
for enjoying the best things of earth. In 
the midst of the wealth of the universe 
many a person is starving because he does 
not have the power to see and to enjoj^ 
the riches that are all around him and 
within the reach of us all. What a vivid 
illustration is that which George Mac- 
donald gives of the old man and his son 
living in the castle, which they owned and 
which had been handed down to them 
through many generations, yet so poor 
that they could scarcely get the bread to 
keep them from starving! Some of their 
remote ancestors had stored up and con- 
cealed within that very castle a large 



i 

i 



THE RICH FOOL 179 

amount of gold and some very costly 
jewels for the use of any of their descend- 
ants who might be in want. Although this 
old man and his son were right close by 
riches that would have given to them the 
greatest abundance, yet they were in a 
starving condition, because they did not 
know of their own wealth. In the midst of 

Ten thousand harps attuned 
To angelic harmonies, 

men sit deaf and mute to the music of 
daily life that is within the reach of all. 

Every month in the year people go to 
Niagara for their first visit who stand 
gazing upon that greatest wonder of the 
world with no more emotion stirring within 
their souls than if they were looking at 
some milldam nearest their own home; and 
they spend their time while there in try- 
ing to calculate its exact commercial value 
if all its power could be utilized. There 
are those who look at the western sky 
when it is all aflame with a glow as if it 
were some vast celestial furnace where new 
worlds are being made, and they can see 



180 SIX FOOLS 

in all that grandeur and glory only an 
indication that to-morrow will be a nice 
day without rain. There are people who 
have no music within their souls who 
cannot enter into the pleasures and de- 
lights of the productions of the masters 
because their souls have never been strung 
to the key of those immortal symphonies. 

If one actually has the love of beauty 
enthroned within, he Tvdll see beauty every- 
where. If one really has the love of music 
within his soul, he will hear music everv- 
where. Birds and trees, plants and flowers, 
brooks and rivers will sing to him their 
melodies. If one is possessed with the 
keen desire to learn all the lessons that 
nature has to teach to him, he will see 
everywhere 

books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 

In an intellectual sense, as well as in 
a physical sense, we possess only as much 
as we are able to assimilate. Therefore 
he is the richest man who absorbs into 
himself the most of the best in the world 



THE RICH FOOL 181 

in which he hves, who gives the most of 
himself out to others, and in whose posses- 
sions others feel the richest. To be rich 
is to have a strong and robust constitu- 
tion; to have ''godliness with contentment, 
which is great gain"; to have an apprecia- 
tion of the beautiful in nature; to have 
access to libraries containing the world's 
best books, and to have a mind so liberally 
stored that one is enabled to say with 
quaint old Edward Dyer: 

My mind to me a kingdom is; 

Such present joys therein I find, 
That it excels all other bliss 

That earth affords or grows by kind. 

Many who meet with losses of property 
find it very difficult to discover the silver 
linings to these dark clouds of financial 
disaster. But the assets are still far in 
excess of the liabilities if in the loss of all 
earthly possessions a person still has health 
and strength, if his family circle abide in 
an unbroken bond of loving companionship, 
if he still has left his business honor un- 
tarnished and unsullied, and his conscience 



182 SIX FOOLS 

clear in the sight of God. If he has these 
still left to him, after the storms of financial 
disaster have made a wreck of all his 
worldly goods, he still has left a fortune 
which should be regarded as having far 
greater intrinsic value than all the regis- 
tered bonds of the Astors and Vanderbilts. 
A young business man of noble character, 
who had large property holdings, but who 
in the time of a commercial panic, after a 
series of financial misfortunes, lost ever^^- 
thing that he had, said to a friend, "I 
have lost all but my wife, my two children, 
my energy, and my good name." \Mio i 

for one moment would question the fact i 

that that young business man still had 
in these priceless treasures that were yet i 

left to him that which was of infinitelv ' 

greater value than all the stock and the 
entire contents of the vaults of the largest 
and strongest bank in his own city.^ \Mio 
would weigh gold in the balances against 
the helpfulness, the s^^npathy, and the 
companionship of a devoted wife, whose 
price the wise man declares is far above 
rubies, the heart of whose husband doth 



! 



THE RICH FOOL 183 

safely trust in her, and whose children 
arise up and call her blessed? Who would 
exchange bank stock for the merry laughter 
and the joyous prattle of the children, that 
give light and love to the home circle? 
Who would exchange God-given energy for 
any kind of bonds that bind a man to a 
life of inglorious inactivity, of utter supine- 
ness, when it comes to making the most 
out of himself in this life, morally and 
intellectually? WTio would exchange his 
good name for filthy lucre, when universal 
experience confirms the truth that "loving 
favor is rather to be chosen than silver 
and gold"? There are stocks of mental 
and moral endowment, there are gold mines 
of love and personal power, there are bonds 
of character that are the rightful heritage 
of every true man and woman, for which 
we can find no just equivalent in all the 
combined riches of earth. 

Making money just for the sake of 
making money is not apt to make man- 
hood. As wealth increases under such a 
motive the soul shrivels. The fact that 
a man has a family Bible in the house, 



184 SIX FOOLS 

lying on the center table, does not make 
him a Christian any more than having a 
sword hanging on the wall above the open 
fire place makes a man a soldier. What 
we are makes us much richer than what 
we have. Character is above all ma- 
terial possessions. He who has nothing 
but money is a pauper. As Emerson says, 
"Without a rich heart wealth is an ugly 
beggar." It is a sad thing to see an old 
man begging bread. But it is sadder still 
to see an aged millionaire tottering on 
the verge of the grave, who has starved 
his soul to fatten his purse, whose covet- 
ousness and greed for gold have dried up 
all the noblest springs of his life, and 
stifled all his aspirations for the good, the 
true, and the beautiful. Many who are 
rich in the abundance of things which 
they possess are dying from starvation of 
the higher and better nature, whose souls 
have become so dwarfed and atrophied 
that the very power of exercising faith in 
God has died out of their lives. 

Christ has shown how all may make 
themselves rich toward God by laying up 



THE RICH FOOL 185 

treasure in heaven. Here is revealed a 
principle that holds in hard times or good. 
It is just the same whether the gold or 
silver standard prevails. It is never affected 
by political, social, or commercial revolu- 
tions. The assurance that we have treas- 
ures in heaven gives rest in weariness, 
comfort in trouble, an anchor both sure 
and steadfast in the storm, confidence in 
perplexity, hope in despair, joy in sorrow. 
While it is true that treasures of earth 
can be thus laid up in heaven, yet in the 
personal building up of a noble, Christ- 
like character, there are laid up on earth 
some of the very choicest treasures of 
heaven. The only kind of riches that can 
be taken into the other world are soul- 
riches: honor and integrity, purity and 
nobility, Chris tlikeness. When moving day 
comes those who go from one house to 
another collect all their valuables together 
and transfer them to the other home, 
while all the trash, that is not worth 
taking, is gathered up and thrown out 
as worthless refuse. When the final mov- 
ing day comeS;, will the soul have real 



186 SIX FOOLS 

valuables to take with it or only worthless 
trash? Treasures can be laid up in heaven 
by investing time and talent, consecrated 
energy and money in the kingdom of God. 
In seeking and securing the higher values 
the temporal may be transformed into the 
eternal. Money may be invested in such 
a way that it will mold the immortal na- 
tures of men, and be made instrumental 
in building structures that will outlast 
"the wrecks of matter, and the crush of 
worlds." The plain and clear teaching of 
the gospel is that greatness of endowment 
carries with it corresponding greatness of 
obligation in the line of ser\4ce. We are 
coming slowly but surely under the sway 
of this gospel principle. More and more 
is the free man becoming the emancipator 
of the enslaved. The learned man is 
becoming more T^idely the teacher and 
helper of the ignorant. The powerful man 
is increasingly becoming the protector and 
defender of the weak. The rich man, out 
of his abundance, is becoming more largely 
the pro^^der for the worthy poor. 
Ashley Cooper, better known as the 



THE RICH FOOL 187 

Earl of Shaftesbury, belonged to one of 
the most prominent families in England 
in wealth and social standing. From the 
very beginning of his notable career he 
manifested the deepest interest in the 
welfare of the children of the poor, seek- 
ing to help them in every way possible. 
Frances Power Cobb once wrote him a 
letter asking what could ever have tempted 
him to leave the society of royalty and 
become the knight-errant of the poor. He 
replied that when he was a lad of ten or 
twelve he was grieved to see that nearly 
all the aristocratic boys with whom he 
played looked down upon the poorer chil- 
dren and taunted them. In his mission to 
the poor he not only founded schools and 
orphanages and gave large endowments for 
securing pensions to the aged, but he gave 
himself in service to the poverty-stricken 
and the outcast. Instead of going out 
to dinner or to some social function, or 
even to his home, following a session in 
the House of Lords that lasted until 
midnight, he frequently went out on the 
streets of London, and with a paid attend- 



188 SIX FOOLS 

ant made his way to the sheltered ends of 
the London bridges and collected the cold 
and the hungry, the waifs and even would- 
be-suicides and provided food and shelter 
for them, a chance to work, and an oppor- 
tunity for a better life. He worked in 
this way through a long term of years, 
for he lived to be an old man. He in- 
vested his life in the kingdom of God, and 
when he died there was such a funeral 
in London as it had never seen even at 
the death of a king. There were marching 
thousands in the procession, and the sound 
of weeping was heard not only in the 
London streets but in every city in the 
United Kingdom. More honor was shown 
to him upon his departure than was given 
to any of his peers, whether they were 
famous in statesmanship, in art, or in 
scholarship. Lord Salisbury, England's 
Prime Minister, in speaking of him in 
the House of Lords said: "Lord Shaftes- 
bury goes down to his grave honored by 
the rich and beloved by the poor. The 
greatness of England consists not in its 
trade and commerce, nor in its nsivy, whose 



THE RICH FOOL 189 

battleships ride the seas, but in men hke 
Lord Shaftesbury." 

The real riches not only of England 
but of the world consist, not in first-class 
securities that lie in fire-proof and burglar- 
proof vaults, not in property holdings 
which in their productive value have be- 
come as rich in yield as a gold mine in 
the Klondike, but the world's real riches 
consist in great hearts like that of Lord 
Shaftesbury, who in response to the world's 
hunger for love and sympathy, for com- 
fort and help, give themselves in service 
to others. 

John Ruskin fell heir to a large patri- 
mony, and as one of the greatest prose 
writers of the nineteenth century, with the 
immense income that came from his books, 
he doubled his fortune. World-famous as 
an author at twenty-one, court and legis- 
lative hall, college and university united 
in paying him reverence and homage. 
Walking through the W^hite Chapel dis- 
trict in East London one day, he saw 
sights that made his heart sick. Every 
brick that his feet touched in the pave- 



190 SIX FOOLS 

ment oozed with filth. In all that section 
of the city there were no parks, no verdure, 
no flowers. The people had no reading 
rooms, no libraries, no art galleries, no 
healthful or helpful social centers, no means 
of wholesome recreation, no opportunity to 
raise themselves out of their hell of degra- 
dation. Evil was everywhere dominant, 
anarchy was rampant. As Paul heard in 
the call of the man of Macedonia at Troas 
the condensed cry of all Europe for the 
gospel, so Ruskin in the vision that came 
to him in East London that day heard 
the composite call of all the submerged 
millions of our cities for help. A pioneer 
in social settlement work, he drew upon 
his own large means, and founded and 
established in that ^Miite Chapel district 
clubs and charities, schools and museums. 
He took thither and placed in these schools 
and museums for the use of those people 
many of his books and curios, and a large 
number of his paintings and art treasures. 
And not only this, but he went to the 
White Chapel district himself once every 
week and gave to those poor, degraded. 



THE RICH FOOL 191 

woe-begone people a whole day of Christ- 
like service, the best that there was in 
him to give. 

We are preaching in these times the 
new evangel, a gospel for the bodies as 
well as for the souls of men. The most 
of religion consisted formerly in teaching 
men how to get ready to die; now we be- 
lieve in teaching men how to get ready to 
live. We no longer spend our time in 
talking and in dreaming about the celestial 
city that is to come; we are striving with 
all our might to make more celestial the 
earthly cities that now are. We are think- 
ing less about the golden streets yonder 
and more about clean streets here; less 
about the songs of the heavenly home and 
more about the sanitation of the earthly 
home; less about the open gates of pearl 
and more about the open gates of the 
saloon, the policy shop, and the gambling 
hell. This sort of religion is a new kind. 
It is unknown and unheard of in some 
quarters, because it is personal, practical, 
and comes down to the problems of every- 
day living. It is a new religion to some 



192 SIX FOOLS 

because it seeks to help people with their 
burdens not only on Sunday but on all 
the other six days of the week. 

The power to make money is the gift 
of God. "It is He that giveth thee power 
to get wealth." Men often regard their 
power to make money as peculiarly their 
own power, never thanking God for it; its 
domination thus sometimes leading them to 
declare their independence of God. They 
make money their god, while their souls 
become as hard and metallic as the gold 
that they worship. The influence which 
the ability to make money gives should be 
used for God. The money-making ability 
implies the possession of industry, econ- 
omy, patience, and all the other stalwart 
and sturdy qualities of character that go 
to make true manhood. But it should be 
continually remembered that the possession 
of money is not proof that a man is good 
or great : it may be an index to his rascality. 
When poverty is a personal asset it is no 
indication that a man is good or great: it 
may point with unerring finger to his im- 
providence, his laziness, or his dishonesty. 



THE RICH FOOL 193 

by which he has lost reputation and credit 
and his means have vanished. But the 
abiHty to make money honestly gives one 
a standing which he may use for the 
advancement of the Kingdom of God. The 
money-maker who has formed the habit of 
systematic giving for the upbuilding of 
God's kingdom has the sweet satisfaction 
of knowing that he is a worker together 
with God in carrying out his wise plans 
for the world's betterment. The rich man 
who trusts ''in the living God who giveth 
us richly all things to enjoy" should ever 
be mindful that these gifts give to him 
as God's steward the ability and the 
opportunity for doing good. He may, by 
making right use of these gifts of God, 
become rich in wealth that will last when 
gold and silver have ceased to be the 
current coin. 

Surely no rational Christian can read 
the teachings of Christ in the New Testa- 
ment upon the subject of giving, as they 
are set forth in his Sermon on the Mount, 
in the incident of the rich young ruler, 
and in his parables of the foolish rich man. 



194 SIX FOOLS 

the unrighteous steward, and the rich man 
and Lazarus, and not be convinced that he 
clearly teaches that we are stewards of 
the manifold grace of God, and that all 
our property is put into our hands to be 
used according to the will of God. Paul, 
in the application which he makes of the 
principles and teachings of Christ upon 
the subject of giving to the churches which 
he had founded, settles upon a method of 
giving which has in it two underlying prin- 
ciples which are applicable to all churches 
and to all times: systematic giving and 
proportionate giving. Paul, in his First 
Epistle to the Corinthians, says: "Now 
concerning the collection. . . . Upon the 
first day of the week let every one of you 
lay by him in store, as God hath prospered 
him." This means that we are to give 
not only systematically, but that we are 
also to give proportionately to our income. 
We find many persons who give most un- 
systematically and not at all in proportion 
to their income. We find many others who 
give systematically in that there is no 
deviation from the fixed sum which they 



THE RICH FOOL 195 

give year after year. Their annual income 
has grown until it is twice, thrice, four 
times, in some cases many times, what it 
was when they began giving that certain 
fixed sum, and yet they continue to give 
just that same total amount year after 
year and no more. That is not according 
to either the Christian requirement or to 
the Pauline standard. We are to give as 
God hath prospered us. When a man 
gives systematically he gives constantly 
instead of occasionally and spasmodically. 
Thus his giving becomes a real joy instead 
of a burden, as so many make it. When 
he increases his giving proportionately to 
his income he gives according to his ability 
instead of according to his inclination. 



V 

THE KING FOOL 



Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may 
play the fool nowhere but in his own house. — 
Shakespeare. 

He who reigns within himself and rules passions, 
desires and fears, is more than King. — Milton. 

Real glory springs from the conquest of our- 
selves; and without that the conqueror is naught 
but the veriest slave. — Thomson. 



THE KING FOOL 

Remarkable and vivid were the con- 
trasts in the life of David. When only 
a humble shepherd lad he was anointed 
as Israel's future king. As a skilled musi- 
cian, as "a cunning player on an harp," 
he appeared before Saul, when that mon- 
arch was dejected and greatly depressed, 
and as he played and sang on, **Saul was 
refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit 
departed from him." In Robert Brown- 
ing's "Saul," pronounced by eminent critics 
"A Messianic oratorio in words" and "in- 
comparably the finest lyric in modern 
poetry," he represents David as pitying 
Saul's great gloom, and in the great effort 
which he makes to overcome his despond- 
ency, through his powerful appeals to the 
heart of the king, he is shown as engaging 
in an intellectual battle far more severe 
and trying than the combat in which he 
engaged with Goliath. 

199 



200 SIX FOOLS 

An unknown peasant youth, coming from 
his country home to the seat of war be- 
tween the Philistines and his own nation, 
he in a brief period became a warrior of 
great renown among his own people, lauded 
and honored by thousands. Coming at 
length to his crown and scepter, the king 
became the sinner, the story of whose 
sin forms one of the darkest recitals in 
the annals of the Bible; but the sinner, 
through the transforming power of divine 
grace, was changed into a pattern of god- 
liness. As the sweet singer of Israel he 
was the greatest of the Hebrew poets. 
As the conqueror of the hereditary foes 
of Israel in successful battles he was pur- 
suer. As the object of Saul's unreasoning 
jealousy and vindictive hatred, and as an 
exile, he was pursued. 

When David was in hiding in the wilder- 
ness of Ziph he was followed by Saul at 
the head of three thousand men. Saul and 
his soldiers were so wearied by their forced 
and rapid day's march that they went at 
once into camp. They felt themselves to 
be so secure with such a large force as 



THE KING FOOL 201 

compared with David's little band, that 
they did not even establish any sentinels, 
and were soon all lost in a deep sleep. 
David and Abishai, thoroughly familiar 
with every nook and corner of that part 
of the country, in the darkness of the 
night made their way into Saul's camp. 
They came up to the sleeping king, and 
could easily have slain him, Abishai en- 
treating David's permission to kill the 
unconscious monarch, but David sternly 
commanded him not to do it. They took, 
however, the king's spear and bolster, that 
were close by the place where he lay, and 
escaped to the surrounding heights. They 
awakened Saul's army by their repeated 
shouts, and David from the hilltop reasoned 
with Saul, who was greatly touched at the 
compassion shown by David in sparing him, 
when he was told how his life had been 
in jeopardy. David demanded to know 
why he should be hunted and driven about 
from place to place as if he were some 
wild beast, and that Saul should tell him 
what wrong, if any, he had committed 
against him. He wished to ascertain what 



202 SIX FOOLS 

evil Saul had laid at his door and what 
he really had against him. David assured 
him that if it was the Lord that had stirred 
him up to this action, then he was ready 
to repent and to make an offering therefor 
before God. But if evil men had stirred 
him up thus to persecute him without just 
cause, they were an accursed lot and were 
utterly unworthy of exercising any such 
influence over him. He declared that as 
to capturing him, Saul might just as well 
try to catch a flea in the open field, or 
attempt to hunt down a partridge in the 
mountains, as to try to run him down and 
hunt him out of his hiding place in such 
a wilderness. Saul was greatly moved by 
David's words, and for the time being he 
saw the folly and wickedness of his actions 
toward him. All the worthless excuses that 
he had been making to ease his own con- 
science for his shameful treatment of David 
were swept away by the burning words of 
his pleading subject as he exclaimed (and 
for the moment he was perfectly sincere 
in what he said), *L have sinned: return, 
my son David: for I will no more do thee 



THE KING FOOL 203 

harm, because my soul was precious in 
thine eyes this day: behold, I have played 
the fool, and have erred exceedingly." 

However wise and bright and strong a 
man may be, unrestrained sin will always 
get him to playing the fool before he gets 
through with life. 

One of the dying martyrs of democracy 
cried out upon the scaffold, ''O Liberty, 
what crimes have been committed in thy 
name!" And every man who has brought 
dire punishment upon himself as the direct 
result of unrestrained sin, has felt: "O 
Liberty, what hells have been dug in thy 
name!" That young man who said: ''I 
want to be free. I wish to feel that I can 
do just as I please. I shall release myself 
from all trammels of usage and custom. 
I shall drink whatever I please and when- 
ever I please. I shall give free range to 
my desires in every direction" — that young 
man dug a hell for himself in the name of 
liberty. That young woman who said: 
'T have no use for these old-fashioned 
doctrines, these antiquated notions of right 
and wrong, these moldy and musty church 



204 SIX FOOLS 

ideas, these worn-out conceptions of pro- 
priety and impropriety. I am going to 
break all these fetters, and be a law unto 
myself. I am going to be entirely inde- 
pendent of the social order" — that young 
woman dug a hell for herself in the name 
of liberty. 

God's universe is a far grander govern- 
ment, a far wiser, a far more tender and 
gracious administration of law than any 
human administration of law can be; and 
it is an accepted principle of all human 
governments that there is no liberty except 
under the law. All great statesmen and 
all large-minded publicists see that all real 
liberty runs to law, and that all genuine 
law produces genuine liberty. Whenever a 
man begins to disobey God's law in this 
universe he commences to drift into the 
self-imposed restraints of a narrower life, 
with smaller opportunities and more and 
more slavery, until at last he finds him- 
self by sin after sin in a prison house of 
black despair, where his bondage is com- 
plete. There can be no darker, no more 
terrible hell than the ever-present con- 



THE KING FOOL 205 

sciousness that a wicked man has that he 
is what he is. Milton in his description 
of Satan and his fall in Paradise Lost 
shows that Satan's worst punishment was 
in being what he himself was, for his own 
confession was, "Myself am hell." A noted 
criminal, who had served one long term in 
the state's prison and who was behind the 
bars for another extended sentence, said, 
"I have made acquaintance with all sorts 
of miseries, but my worst punishment is 
in being what I am." 

Our highest liberty comes to us when we 
are under the control of law, and no soul 
can ever come to its highest and best 
estate unless it is dominated by some 
power higher, nobler, and grander than 
itself. The artist is never so free as when 
he is working within the restrictions and 
limitations of artistic law. The singer is 
never so free as when the voice in every 
way conforms to the laws of melody. The 
orator is never so free as when the powers 
of his eloquence conform to the laws of 
logic, the laws of rhetoric, and the laws of 
eflPective expression. So in the higher 



206 SIX FOOLS 

realm of the moral law there is no freedom 
for a person unless he is an obedient 
servant of Almighty God. The only real 
liberty in God's universe is that which 
comes from doing God's will. 

There stand out some of the thrones of 
history that tell the pitiful, dreadful story 
of abused liberty. Look yonder at that 
throne in the literary world filled by Scot- 
land's gifted poet, Robert Burns. Nature 
had richly endowed him with intellectual 
power of the rarest kind. But in the fair 
name of liberty he gave unbridled license 
to appetite and passion until, by reckless 
dissipation, he had ruined his character 
and had wrecked his life. Look yonder at 
another throne in the literary world where 
one of the noblest and richest intellects 
this world ever produced began to reign. 
When Byron took hold of his scepter no 
man in the world exercised so large an 
intellectual dominion. But he gave him- 
self up to wild, ungovernable license, which 
he mistook for liberty, trampling the laws 
of God and of man down into the mire 
of his own appetites and passions, and as 



THE KING FOOL 207 

he drew near to the end of his wretched 
and miserable career, he wrote: 

My days are in the yellow leaf; 

The flowers and fruits of love are gone; 
The worm, the canker, and the grief 

Are mine alone. 

Look yonder at that throne in English 
history upon which sat Richard III, who 
in the fair name of liberty freed himself 
from all righteousness and from all the 
high ideals and the great truths of a just 
and noble life. He found at last that his 
greatest punishment lay in the fact that 
he could not escape from his own wicked 
personality, that he could not get rid of 
himself. As he lay there like a beggar 
in his tent, suffering all the horrors of a 
lost soul, with all those ghostly specters 
before him, that stood out in view as the 
tangible realities of his own sins, he 
cried out: 

"My conscience hath a thousand several tongues. 
And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
And every tale condemns me for a villain." 



208 SIX FOOLS 

Just such pictures are common in all 
the walks of everyday life. Men and 
women once pure and noble have gone 
down into the mire and the clay of de- 
based appetite and depraved passion and 
have found the hell of the most galling 
bondage, the most terrible suffering, when 
they have supposed that they were in 
pursuit of liberty. Sin will cause even men 
of great natural and acquired ability to 
play the fool. In native endowment Saul 
had a bright, keen, strong intellect and 
possessed great natural force of character. 
His reign began auspiciously, and his career 
might have continued clear on to the end 
as splendidly as it began if he had not 
chosen the way of evil. But he sinned 
against God and man, and it was unre- 
strained sin that put him to playing the 
fool. When his moral decline once began 
he went down swiftly. He turned against 
his best friend, Samuel. He was untrue 
to his own household. He betrayed his 
own son Jonathan. The royal palace was 
soon deserted. His soldiers broke out in 
mutiny against him, and the soil was 



THE KING FOOL 209 

stained with blood. The people mourned 
for Saul, and the pathos of their grief was 
that their king had not fulfilled the golden 
prophecy of his youth. He was disobedient 
unto the heavenly vision that God gave 
him of what he might become. If he had 
obeyed that vision, it would have led him 
onward and upward to the noblest heights 
of character achievement. But he dis- 
obeyed that vision and was dragged down- 
ward until his very name became a blight 
and a curse. Saul erred exceedingly and 
played the fool. 

The queenly city of Jerusalem in her 
palmiest days wore upon her fair brow a 
crown of glory, which was removed through 
her sin and disobedience. As a punishment 
for her sins that beautiful city was over- 
thrown, the temple was destroyed, and the 
people were driven away into captivity. 
It is under the image of an interrupted 
feast that Jeremiah describes the con- 
dition of the people, and the picture is 
vividly drawn. In that far-away time the 
guest of honor at any Oriental feast often 
had a crown of flowers placed upon his 



210 



SIX FOOLS 



head. This was the figure used by the 
prophet in describing the appearance of 
Jerusalem during the time of her most 
joyous festivities. But in the period of 
her sorrowful decadence the elders are no 
longer to be seen at the gate administering 
the law. The young men are heard no 
more performing on their musical instru- 
ments. Joy has died out in the hearts of 
the people. Sad mourners have taken the 
place of rejoicing singers. Jeremiah la- 
ments the change, that has come through 
sin and disobedience: **The crown is fallen 
from our head; woe unto us that we have 
sinned." Men have been given the birth- 
right of kingship. But sin makes them 
aliens from the divine kingdom, removes 
from their heads the crown of their king- 
ship, pulls them down from the throne of 
their power, and drags them into slavery. 

When Benedict Arnold was living in 
London in his old age, a certain man once 
went to him and asked for letters of recom- 
mendation to some prominent parties in 
America. The aged traitor stood back, 
stricken aghast at the very suggestion. 



THE KING FOOL 211 

"What!" he said, most bitterly. "Ask 
letters of recommendation from me? Have 
you lost your reason? Do you not know 
that every honest American would curse 
the man who bore credentials with my 
signature? I have bartered away my 
birthright. My good name is gone forever." 
Material prosperity may accompany 
evildoing for a time. But just retribution 
is bound to come in the end. The pre- 
vailing superficial view of sin, which is 
resulting in an ever-increasing laxity in 
the observance of God's laws, should be 
recognized as one of the chief perils of our 
times. Sinners are being called only "the 
creatures of unfavorable circumstances" 
and "the victims of bad environment, over 
which they have had no control." But 
sane men are never "the creatures of un- 
favorable circumstances," nor are they ever 
"the victims of bad environment" in the 
sense that they are not responsible for 
their actions. No sane person who has 
come to years of maturity is in any true 
sense a creature of chance; but we are, 
rather, each one of us, the sum total of 



212 SIX FOOLS 

results that have come from causes that 
we ourselves have set in motion. Men 
to-day sneer at the great fact of sin. It 
has been called "the result of the misad- 
justment of the faculties." It has been 
termed "an unfortunate but irresponsible 
tendency." Our common sense should 
teach us, entirely apart from theology, that 
there can be no such "misadjustment of 
the faculties" as to render men unaccount- 
able for their conduct; and there does not 
exist such "an unfortunate but irrespon- 
sible tendency" as to render men not 
responsible for their actions. The great, 
ugly, omnipresent fact of sin cannot be 
eliminated from the problem of human life. 
Men are always deluding themselves with 
the promise that they will repent before 
they go too far; but they do not take into 
proper consideration the terrible fact that 
sin takes away a man's crown of self- 
control. Men are always forgetful of the 
fact that yielding to minor temptations 
always paves the way to the commission 
of greater and still greater sins. Temporary 
consent with Satan glides at last into a 



THE KING FOOL 213 

settled agreement. Once in the way of 
evil, there is always a tendency toward 
fixedness of character. Successive acts 
weave themselves into habits, habits into 
character, and character makes eternal 
destiny. Where a man's choices have been 
wandering away from the right track for 
a time habit will at last insist upon a 
fixed law as the rule and motive of his 
actions. The sinful preferences that have 
long been gratified at last will form a 
union with the powers of darkness; and 
the habits that have thus become estab- 
lished will lead the soul down to perdition. 
The stone that is laid upon the founda- 
tion may be only a little out of plumb; but 
that mistake, if it is continued clear up 
the wall, will make the whole building 
unsafe. Thus it is that a person deceives 
himself in the matter of evil conduct. He 
views the actions of a given day simply 
with reference to what he has done the day 
before; and because he can discern such 
a little difference between those actions, 
that he thus puts so closely together, he 
flatters himself that there is just as little 



214 SIX FOOLS i 

difference between his present moral stand- 
ard and what it was three or four years 
ago. But he forgets that his standard of 
conduct has been gradually brought down 
from a higher to a lower plane. His finer 
sensibilities have been steadily blunted. 
His moral judgment has become gradually 
perverted, so that his conscience is now 
far less sensitive to suggestions of right 
and duty. He fails to remember that by 
the aggregation of those minute mistakes, 
those minor omissions of duty, those little 
sins, he has already gone far away in the 
direction of evil. 

The story is told that an eagle was seen 
to alight upon the body of a lamb frozen 
into a cake of floating ice on Niagara 
River three miles above the falls. While 
devouring the flesh of the lamb that eagle's 
claws became frozen into its fleece. WTien 
the king of birds neared the falls, uncon- 
scious of his bondage, he stooped and 
spread his powerful wings and leaped to 
flight; but in spite of a terrible struggle he 
was held fast and went down into the 
chasm. So the man who is indifferent to 



THE KING FOOL 215 

the rebukes of conscience and careless of 
the hideous results that must come from 
sin thinks that he can at any time escape 
to safety. But when he wishes at last to 
free himself from the self-imposed bondage 
which he has unconsciously made he finds 
that his affections and desires are so en- 
tangled in sin that he cannot escape. 

Only a little error at the marksman's 
hand becomes a wide divergence in the 
neighborhood of the target. So a little 
sin begun in the days of youth means a 
great deal of deviation from the right as 
it has gone on through the years. On a 
couch in yonder mansion there lies a man 
who is tossing in the critical hour of pneu- 
monia or typhoid fever. The physician in 
charge, after the council has been held in 
the home with two of the greatest medical 
specialists in the city, tells the family that 
there is no hope. As they are leaving the 
house the family doctor remarks to the 
other two: "If he had lived a good life, 
we could save him. But fast living and 
dissipation have so undermined his consti- 
tution that there is nothing to build on." 



216 SIX FOOLS 

We behold a young man, of a wealthy 
and aristocratic family, who is facing the 
possibilities of a great career. He has a 
circle of friends who represent the highest 
social standing. Large opportunities are 
beckoning to him. But he has taken his 
college curriculum in the most superficial 
manner possible; and in his professional 
course he has done only enough work to 
escape being dismissed from the institution. 
He has gone abroad and has lived a bohe- 
mian life at its worst. He is utterly un- 
prepared for the large responsibilities that 
are inviting him, and will never measure 
up to the requirements. His sins of laziness 
and incompetency are sure to find him 
out. He will be compelled to reap the 
harvest of inevitable failure that comes 
from the sowing of his neglect. The crown 
is fallen from his head; and woe is unto 
him that he has sinned. 

All history abounds with the sad records 
of those who have been acknowledged 
geniuses or endowed with great talent and 
who have started out splendidly, but, like 
Saul, they have made shipwreck of their 



THE KING FOOL 217 

lives. Think of the great numbers of 
strong, proud, and noble ships upon the 
ocean of Hfe that have been wrecked 
through gambHng, drink, and lust. Think 
of the multitudes of lives that have begun 
so well but which through sin have ended 
as Saul's life did, in the depths of awful 
despair. 

Charles Lamb was one of the quaintest 
and most delightful humorists in literature. 
While all the world laughed at his winsome 
humor, all the world was saddened at his 
self-imposed bondage. Can there be any- 
thing sadder than this awful cry of despair 
that came from Lamb when he knew that 
he was hopelessly enslaved by drink? — 
*'The waters have gone over me. But 
out of the depths, could I be heard, I would 
cry out to all those who have set a foot 
in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to 
whom the first flavor of wine is delicious, 
look into my desolation; could he be made 
to understand what a dreary thing it is 
when a man shall feel himself going down 
a precipice with open eyes and passive will; 
could he see his own destruction and have 



218 SIX FOOLS 

no power to arrest it, yet could he feel it 
all emanating from himself; could he see 
all godliness empty out of him, yet not 
be able to forget the time when it was 
otherwise; could he bear about the piteous 
spectacle of his ruin; could he see my 
feverish eye, feverish with last night's 
drinking, and feverishly looking for to- 
night's repetition of that folly; could he 
but feel the body of death, out of which 
I cry hourly, with feeble outcr^^ to be 
delivered, it were enough to make him 
dash the sparkling beverage to the earth, 
in all the pride of its mantling temptation!" 
Edgar Allan Poe w^as an acknowledged 
literary genius. He wrote some poems 
that are immortal in literature, and that 
will be read and admired as long as the 
English language is spoken. Yet wdthal he 
was a slave to drink, and died as a result 
of his thralldom to drink. We have from 
Dr. J. J. Moran, the resident physician of 
the Washington Hospital in Baltimore, 
where Poe died, this harrowing record of 
his death: *Toe came to Baltimore on his 
way to Philadelphia. He was handsomely 



THE KING FOOL 219 

dressed, and had with him an ample ward- 
robe neatly packed away in his trunk. 
Upon landing on the wharf from the Nor- 
folk steamer he was greeted by some of his 
old and former associates. They insisted 
that they should all take a glass together 
for old acquaintance' sake, and the unfor- 
tunate poet yielded to these persuasions. 
This, the first drink which he had taken 
for several months, revived his latent appe- 
tite for drink, and the result was a terrible 
debauch, which ended in his death. He 
lost his trunk and all his wardrobe. When 
found he was clad in tattered garments 
and had on an old straw hat, which no 
one would have picked up in the streets. 
His appearance and condition were forlorn 
and pitiable in the extreme. He was 
brought to my hospital in this drunken and 
stupid state. Everything that medical skill 
and faithful nursing could suggest was done 
for him, but it was all to no purpose. He 
was either unconscious or delirious through 
the entire time, some sixteen hours, that 
he continued to live after entering the 
hospital, with but one short interval of 



220 SIX FOOLS 

consciousness. When for a few moments 
reason returned, during that one short 
gleam of consciousness, he looked at me 
and said with great emphasis, *Dr. Moran, 
give me a pistol that I may blow my 
brains out!' Then he suddenly relapsed 
into his former delirious condition and 
soon died." 

Charles Stewart Parnell was for many 
years the remarkably keen and thoroughly 
trusted leader of the Irish cause in the 
English Parliament. As a speaker, reserved 
and dignified, he had a strong and rugged 
eloquence peculiar to himself. He had an 
unusual knowledge of parliamentary law, 
which served him well in the quick give- 
and-take of public debate. He seemed to 
have an unlimited measure of common 
sense and was dowered above all with a 
masterful will, which made him the ac- 
knowledged commander of others because 
he first governed himself. He began entirely 
alone, and fought his way upward step by 
step, until some of the greatest statesmen 
in Great Britain came to believe in him, 
to respect him, and to espouse his cause. 



THE KING FOOL 221 

Gladstone at length became allied with him 
as an ardent supporter of home rule. He 
at this time was great enough to offer of 
his own accord to Mr. Gladstone to retire 
from public life altogether, if in his judg- 
ment such an action would be helpful to 
the Irish cause. When he and others of 
his party were accused by the London 
Times of complicity with the crimes and 
outrages committed by the extreme section 
of the Irish nationalist party, a commission 
of three judges was appointed by the 
British government to investigate. After a 
great deal of evidence had been received 
from both sides, a report was laid before 
Parliament by this commission acquitting 
him of all the graver charges against him. 
He sued the publishers of the Times for 
libel, and obtained a verdict of twenty-five 
thousand dollars against them. Almost any 
man with a clear eye for historic per- 
spective would have said concerning Parnell 
at this time: "Here is a man who will live 
in history as one of the world's great 
figures." But the sin which destroyed 
Samson undermined him. It was long 



222 SIX FOOLS 

covered up and concealed; but, like all sin, 
as it grew into mastery and control of the 
man's nature, it became bold and defiant. 
At last his shame was uncovered before all 
the world. He was proven to be the guilty 
corespondent in a divorce case, in which 
he had destroyed the domestic peace of a 
home by alienating the affections of a wife 
from her husband. Then he was asked to 
retire from the leadership of the Irish 
cause. He was shown that his cause would 
certainly fail unless he relieved it of his 
burden. Gladstone in a letter to John 
Morley stated that if Parnell continued 
to be leader, it would be disastrous in 
the highest degree to the cause of Ire- 
land. Following the publication of this 
letter, he was deserted by the great ma- 
jority of his Parliamentary followers. But 
his sin seemed to have changed his whole 
nature, so that he had lost the power to 
be self-denying or to do great and generous 
deeds. He fought vigorously to the last 
to maintain his position as leader of the 
Irish people. But as Lucifer fell like a 
star from heaven to the deepest hell, so 



THE KING FOOL 228 

he fell from his leadership and from the 
respect of Christendom. He died as Sam- 
son died, broken-hearted and in shame. 

Oscar Wilde was a man of brilliant in- 
tellect, one of Oxford's finest scholars, 
winning upon his graduation the Newdi- 
gate prize for English verse. Taking up 
his residence in London and devoting his 
time to literary work, his poems are marked 
by great beauty of thought and melody 
of movement. He was the author of a 
number of comedies which are remarkable 
for their sparkling, epigrammatic cleverness. 
Upon his visit to this country, as a dis- 
tinguished apostle of aesthetics, he was 
given great receptions, and was the social 
lion of the four hundred in the largest 
cities of our land. His true character was 
not at that time known. But he was a 
man of the flesh, led away and controlled 
by his baser appetites. Instead of the 
spirit ruling the body, sensuality was the 
master. His crimes, when they were dis- 
covered, appalled all London, being paral- 
leled only by the most infamous carnal 
indulgence of the Roman empire in the 



224 



SIX FOOLS 



days of its greatest decadence. He spent 
several years of his life in prison for un- 
speakable sins, and at last came to a 
miserable end. 

His wife, who came from a fine fam- 
ily, with great charity and loyalty, had 
forborne from seeking even a judicial 
separation from her husband, after his 
consignment to prison at hard labor. But 
she found after his death that the smirched 
name of the man, who had been execrated 
by the best people of England, was too 
great a handicap for her two boys, who 
were everywhere shunned by the better 
class of people with whom they happened 
to come in social contact, as if they were 
afflicted with some contagious disease. So 
for their sakes she took the necessary legal 
steps and resumed her maiden name, and 
obtained permission for them to adopt it 
in lieu of that of their dishonored father. 

All these men to whom reference has 
been made were kings in intellect; but 
they all erred exceedingly and played the 
fool. So we find here a teaching that 
appeals especially to the young man who 



THE KING FOOL 225 

prides himself upon his intellectual ability. 
He would have it understood that he is 
nobody's fool, and that he is abundantly 
able to take care of himself. He would 
have it known that he can drink in mod- 
eration whenever he feels like it, gamble 
now and then whenever he is so disposed, 
and indulge in even worse practices than 
these whenever he is so minded; and yet 
he will never allow himself to be carried 
away or become enslaved by them. 

Many young men have talked just that 
way who are now hopelessly wrecked in 
character, broken-hearted, eaten with re- 
morse, and most pitiable fragments of men. 
Many a young man has started out in life 
as a wine drinker who has refused to be- 
come a total abstainer. He has regarded 
the obligation of total abstinence as an 
infringement upon his personal liberty, but 
he has ended his life in the wreck and ruin 
of the most terrible bondage. 

When I was a small lad, in one of the 
homes of my boyhood, I knew the wreck 
of a man whom they called old Jack Christy. 
He had formerly been called the Hon. 



226 SIX FOOLS 

John Christy, and was a man highly 
respected and esteemed in that community. 
He was a distinguished lawyer, well known 
for his extraordinary talents in that sec- 
tion of the State, having few equals and 
no superiors as an eloquent pleader before 
juries in the courts of that judicial district. 
He had a large law practice, which was 
constantly growing, was regarded as a 
rising politician, and was in great demand 
as a stump speaker. In public speech he 
had ready command of a large fund of 
information; he was witty, logical, and 
magnetic, and had the power to sway the 
multitudes at his will. Everyone who knew 
John Christy admired his brilliant talents 
and prophesied for him the brightest possi- 
ble future. But he became a slave to 
drink. He exchanged a comfortable home 
for a miserable hovel, the garb of a gentle- 
man for the rags of a pauper, manhood for 
beastliness, all that was good in him for 
all that was bad. Many a time did the 
saloon keepers of that place call him a 
miserable drunken loafer, take him by the 
collar and kick him out into the streets. 



THE KING FOOL 227 

Once they had fawned upon him, courted 
his favor, flattered and praised him. But 
when he .became a helpless slave to drink 
and a dirty, ragged pauper, they would 
not have him loafing around in their 
saloons because it hurt their business. He 
was such a dreadful example of what 
drink will always do that they could not 
sell drinks nearly as fast when they had 
him hanging around. Men came in who 
had known the Hon. John Christy, of only 
a few years before, looked upon him, and 
then went out without taking any drinks. 
So after the saloon keepers had ruined poor 
old John, body and soul, they made a 
practice of kicking him out. I have heard 
John B. Gough and some others of the 
most distinguished lecturers on intemper- 
ance upon the American platform. But 
the most convincing temperance lecture 
that I ever had given me came in the 
form of an object lesson when, as a boy, 
knowing so well his past history and what 
he might have been, I often saw poor old 
John Christy go staggering past my father's 
house. It was an object lesson that burned 



228 SIX FOOLS 

itself into my very soul, and that has 
made me always to hate rum and the rmn- 
traffic as I hate the devil. My father, as he 
told me the life story of John Christy, made 
me pledge eternal enmity against the drink 
power that had ruined him. Many a time 
as I saw John Christy go staggering past 
our house, I doubled up my chubby fist 
and said, "I'll fight that accursed thing 
that has ruined John Christy as long as 
I live." 

The human body is by far the most 
beautiful, the most exquisite organization 
that has come from the hand of the Creator. 
The thoughtful psalmist declared, "I am 
fearfully and wonderfully made." If that 
were true in the days of the psalmist, how 
much greater and grander is the truth in 
these times of such remarkable progress in 
physiological science! We can the more 
fully understand the force of the observa- 
tion of Galen when he challenged any one, 
even after one hundred years of study, to 
find out the smallest bone or fiber of the 
human body that might be more com- 
modiously placed either for practical use 



THE KING FOOL 229 

or comeliness of form. The inspired apostle 
well likens man's body to a stately temple, 
well proportioned and perfect in all its 
parts; and the author of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews represents Christ as saying to 
God the Father, ''A body hast thou pre- 
pared me." These words, in a modified 
sense, may be used by every one of us. 
God has done for us what he did for Jesus 
Christ in that he has put each one of us in 
possession of a body that we are to take 
care of and to use only for the noblest ends. 
George Macdonald gives sound advice to 
all those who are engaged in bringing up 
children where he counsels them to treat 
children as souls having bodies, rather than 
as bodies having souls. This mistake of 
regarding children as having souls rather 
than bodies is a mistake that all religious 
teachers are apt to fall into. This is the 
most common method of religious teaching, 
to be reminding people constantly that 
they have immortal souls, that God has 
given to them spiritual natures that must 
be cared for and cultivated. This is set 
forth in the stanza of the well known hymn: 



230 SIX FOOLS 

A charge to keep I have, 

A God to glorify, 
A never-dying soul to save, 

And fit it for the sky. 

That is the burden and the drift of nearly 
all evangelical appeals. But something 
very important is still left unsaid. It 
should be constantly and forcefully set 
forth as a clear and distinctive teaching 
that it is the mission of Christianity not 
merely to save souls but to save men; to 
save men's bodies as well as to save their 
souls. God has not only given to each 
one a soul, an invisible and immortal 
nature, that is to be fitted for a future life, 
but God has also given to each one a body 
that is to be kept as a fit temple for the 
dwelling place of the soul, and that is to 
be employed in this present life to serve 
the truest and the noblest ends. 

The highest aim of every individual 
should be to take the best possible care 
of the body that God has prepared for 
him, and bring it to the greatest possible 
degree of culture and efficiency. This, 
therefore, should be a daily vow: "A body 



THE KING FOOL 231 

thou hast prepared me, O God; and it shall 
be kept stainless and immaculate for thee." 
The most startling language in the whole 
Bible is that which is used to condemn 
the man who "sinneth against his own 
body." Paul says, "The body is for the 
Lord; and the Lord for the body." There 
is no principle more strongly insisted upon 
in the Scriptures than that contained in 
the precept, "Keep thyself pure." There 
is no vice upon which is threatened more 
terrible punishment than the evil of un- 
chastity. The Bible does not so much 
speak on this matter as it thunders — bolt 
after bolt, peal after peal — warning men of 
the awful consequences of carnal indulgence 
both in this life and in that which is to 
come. Secret sin against the body is the 
greatest curse of blossoming manhood. It 
takes the glow from the cheek, the bright- 
ness from the eye, and the virility out of 
the blood. It destroys the will power and 
the vital energy, weakens the intellect, im- 
pairs the memory, and paves the way to 
melancholy, insanity, and death. Social 
impurity is our nation's unclean dragon 



232 SIX FOOLS 

that is strewing the earth with the wrecks 
and ruins of what otherwise would have 
been some of the finest examples of noble 
manhood and womanhood. It is this 
abhorred spirit of lechery and lust, by 
whatever name it goes or under whatever 
guise it masquerades, that would lay its 
leprous finger upon the lips of virtue and 
command silence upon this subject, because 
it is a matter that is too delicate for dis- 
cussion in public speech and print. But 
men surely have the God-given right to 
be as plain and as outspoken against this 
sin as the Bible is; and the Bible lifts up 
the most solemn voice of warning to all 
those who may be tempted to fall into 
the snares of her whose "house is the way 
to hell, going down to the chambers of 
death." "She hath cast down many 
wounded. Yea, many strong men have 
been slain by her." "Her house inclineth 
unto death, and her paths unto the dead." 
"Let not thine heart decline to her ways, 
go not astray in her paths. And thou 
mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy 
body are consumed, and say. How have I 



1 



THE KING FOOL 233 

hated instruction, and my heart despised 
reproof." 

History unites with the Scriptures in 
teaching that nothing more swiftly and 
utterly works moral and physical ruin than 
this sin against bodily purity. Hartley 
Coleridge, the brilliantly endowed son of 
the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a 
king in intellect, who in his early manhood 
gave promise of achievements of genius that 
would equal those of his distinguished father. 
But he became a slave to the demon of 
licentiousness, and speedily passed into a 
permanent eclipse and died a disappoint- 
ment to himself and to his friends. When 
at the age of twenty-five, a physical wreck 
and with all his vital energies exhausted, he 
wrote upon the fly-leaf of his Bible: 

When I received this volume small, 
My years were barely seventeen, 

When it was hoped I should be all 
Which once, alas! I might have been. 

And now my years are twenty-five, 
And every mother hopes her lamb, 

And every happy child alive, 
May never be what now I am. 



234 



SIX FOOLS 



How many young men there are in our 
land who have been ruined by the demon 
of licentiousness, upon the fly-leaves of 
whose Bibles these lines might be appro- 
priately yet sorrowfully written! 

What does this demon of licentiousness 
really say to every young man? "Come 
to me, O young man, and I will sap your 
vital energies, and blight and blacken your 
future. I will put insuperable barriers in 
your way, that will mortgage you to death 
before you have had the opportunity to 
take the first steps in an honorable career, 
and I will foreclose my mortgage on you 
before you have any chance to succeed in 
life. I will send such throbs of pain along 
your nerves and muscles that they will 
make your body a living inferno. I will 
loosen your joints, and bend forward your 
frame so as to make you more and more 
like the four-footed beasts of the field. I 
will write my signature of infamy all over 
your person. I will put upon you eating 
ulcers, and turn your whole body into a 
lazar house of disease. I will send foul 
spirits to inhabit your breath, while every 



THE KING FOOL 235 

pore of your body reeking with poison 
will cry out with the lepers of the olden 
time, 'Unclean!' " 

Talk with prominent city physicians 
about this sin of social impurity and your 
blood will run cold, as you hear how this 
dreadful cancer is eating its way into the 
very heart of our American life. Visit the 
wards in our great city hospitals, that are 
given over entirely to the care of the 
sufferers from social impurity, and you will 
there witness the physical torments of 
literal hells on earth, which will remind 
you of Dore's illustrations of Dante's In- 
ferno; and, shuddering from these horrors, 
as you make your way from a region of 
"outer darkness" back once more into the 
light of God's open day, you will think 
of Dante's inscription over the doorway to 
hell: "All hope abandon ye who enter here." 

The obligations of the marriage relation 
should be regarded as equally binding upon 
both husband and wife. Public opinion 
should be so changed in this land that 
it will come to stand upon a platform that 
shall insist upon two things: that it shall 



236 



SIX FOOLS 



mete out exactly the same condemnation 
to men offenders as it does to women 
transgressors of the law of social purity; 
that it shall also stand ready to help 
with equal heartiness the guilty woman 
back to a pure life, when she gives evidence 
of genuine repentance, as it is now to aid 
the repentant and often unrepentant guilty 
man. 

We have all observed these outline facts 
again and again in the history of every- 
day life. A young man, who moves in 
aristocratic circles and who has wealth, 
under most sacred promises betrays sweet 
innocence. She, from that her first sin 
of this kind, turns downward. Is it much 
to wonder at, when nine tenths of the 
world stand ready to give her and her 
unfathered child a push toward hell? But 
how shamefully often it is the case that, 
after his sin has been proclaimed upon the 
very housetops, he is received into the 
highest social circles in the place where 
he lives. He is smiled upon by fond 
mothers, who would look with favor upon 
him as a prospective son-in-law. And 



THE KING FOOL 237 

what is their comment? "O, yes. He is 
just a httle wild. He has been somewhat 
fast. All young men have their time for 
sowing their wild oats, and he has sown 
his full share of them. But that is past 
now. He will settle down all right. He is 
so bright, so witty, so congenial. He has 
such charming manners, and then, you 
know, he is very well off." They say, 
'*He is all right," and public opinion 
accepts their verdict. But as surely as 
there is a God in heaven, that man, unless 
he repents of his great sin and seeks to 
make full amends for his monstrous wrong, 
will eventually, either in this world or in 
some other world, receive his just pun- 
ishment. 

The day will come when womanhood 
will demand just such purity of the man- 
hood that it weds as manhood everywhere 
now demands of the womanhood that it 
weds. I would that we might have a 
national brotherhood of men, that would 
take in all ranks and classes of men, who 
would pledge themselves to treat all women 
with respect and would seek to protect 



238 SIX FOOLS 

them from wrong and degradation; who 
would endeavor to put down all indecent 
language and obscene stories; who would 
seek in every way possible to give to their 
boys and younger brothers proper informa- 
tion concerning the sexual laws of their 
being and to warn them most earnestly 
against the sin of social impurity; who 
would maintain the law of purity as 
equally binding upon men and women; and 
who would give daily obedience to the 
command, ''Keep thyself pure." 

Christ has given a very impressive pic- 
ture of a young man who played the fool 
for a time, who demanded and received his 
share of the patrimony, who journeyed into 
the far country and there spent his sub- 
stance in riotous living. That young man 
erred exceedingly and played the fool; but 
the moment he resolved to return to his 
father's house he stopped playing the fool 
and became a man. For the most of 
men who go in the way of evil it is but 
a short distance into the far country; but 
it is such a long way back that a man 
never will get back to the Father's house 



THE KING FOOL 239 

unless he comes by the way of the cross. 
Sometimes a young man will travel away 
from honor and rectitude countless leagues 
in one single act. That young man now 
beginning his sentence behind the bars 
as a defaulter, only six short months ago 
was classed among the highly respectable 
people of the community where he lived. 
What a short distance he had to travel 
lo get into the far country, when he took 
the few minutes to forge the note, which 
led to his trial, conviction, sentence and 
imprisonment, and what a long and weary 
way it now seems to him to get back to 
the place of respect and esteem in which 
he was once held! What an almost in- 
finite distance it seems to be between that 
yesterday, only a few brief months ago, 
with its serene peace and calm beauty, 
and to-day with its flush and fever of 
shame, its deep reproach, its bitter re- 
morse, its darkness and its heartbreak. 
When we start on our journey back from 
the far country we find that God comes a 
good deal more than half way to meet us 
at the cross of Christ. We never will get 



240 



SIX FOOLS 



back to the Father's house unless we come 
by the way of Calvary. At last, when 
this young man came to himself, when 
he struck bottom, when he got hold of 
the last thing that was left, himself, when 
he came to his own conscience, his own 
heart and his own intellect, then he was 
thoroughly aroused, then he said, "I will 
arise and go to my father." Into whatever 
sin we may go, and whatever distance we 
may travel into the far country, whenever 
we feel our own urgent need of the Father 
and decide to return to him, we will always 



find him waiting to welcome us. 



'AH 



the fitness he requireth is to feel our need 
of him;" and as we thus come to our best 
selves, and come back from the far country 
by way of Calvary, we may look up and 
see Some One else ready to meet us there 
at the cross, our Father, who will willingly 
receive us. 



VI 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 



A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to 
atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's 
minds about to religion. — Bacon. 

In its investigations of questions of origins sci- 
ence has made a discovery. It has seen plainly 
that atheism is unscientific. It is a remarkable 
thing that atheism, after trailing its black length 
for centuries across European thought, should have 
its doom pronounced by science. — Henry Drummond. 



The inward conviction, the craving for a final 
cause, the theistic assumption, is itself one of the 
master facts of the universe and is as much en- 
titled to respect as any fact in physical nature can 
be. — John Fiske. 



\\ 



VI 

THE NO-GOD FOOL 

The Syrian sky, into which the psalmist 
had so often looked, is amazingly clear; 
so free from fogs, mists, and clouds that 
through the most of the year with the 
unaided vision one is enabled to study the 
movements of the heavenly bodies. That 
luminous firmament and its unclouded skies 
account for some very considerable achieve- 
ments that were gained in astronomy in 
the Oriental countries long before the 
telescope was invented. The psalmist had 
spent many a night out in the open in 
Palestine in that wonderfully transparent 
atmosphere gazing up at the silent, sentinel 
stars. The longer he observed and studied 
and meditated the more did he become 
aware of the vastness, the grandeur, and 
sublimity of the works of creation, and 
the more did he come to believe in the 
existence of an all-wise Creator. There 

243 



244 



SIX FOOLS 



came to him the strong conviction, which 
finds expression in so many portions of 
the Psalms, that all these marvelously 
created works must have back of them a 
Divine Framer and Creator. "The heavens 
declare the glory of God; and the firma- 
ment showeth his handywork." He had 
grown to have such a strong, all-mastering 
confidence in the existence of a God that 
it had become at last a fundamental belief. 
It was an assurance that had taken such 
a hold upon his very soul that he was 
driven to the conclusion that it was only 
the fool who could say in his heart, "There 
is no God." This assertion that there is 
no God is not the verdict that results from 
a careful examination of existing evidence, 
but it comes always from shallow in- 
vestigation. 

The universe is one vast procession of 
effects that are related to causes. What 
we at first call causes, on a closer inspec- 
tion and analysis resolve themselves into 
effects. But every effect must have a 
cause that is adequate to the effect. As 
only an Almighty Cause can be efficient 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 245 

for such vast and varied effects, the great 
original fontal cause must be God, the 
Father Almighty. 

We find design evident everywhere. De- 
sign implies mind; mind implies thought; 
thought implies a thinker; a thinker im- 
plies a person. Thus step by step we rise 
to the conception of an Almighty Person, 
who is above us and around us. 

We find in our environment that we are 
bound in upon every side by limitations 
that are incident to our own finiteness. 
But all these intimations, suggestions, evi- 
dences of our finiteness point to the exist- 
ence of an Infinite One, who is uncircum- 
scribed and unlimited as to his powers and 
abilities. We cannot have the finite without 
premising the Infinite. 

The illusive phantom of the ideal, that 
is always before us and that is never fully 
attained, points irresistibly to a perfect 
Personality and Character, who is the 
causal source, from whom the inspiration 
of all our own ideals must come. The 
master in literary work is never fully sat- 
isfied with even the best products of his 



246 SIX FOOLS 

pen. After many weary months spent in 
most careful composition and in constant 
correction and revision, even then his 
production comes far short of what he 
thinks it ought to be. The sweetest music, 
the finest painting, the most perfect stat- 
uary, the sublimest eloquence, are never 
quite equal to the demand of the highest 
ideal of the true musician, the real artist, 
the genuine orator. 

No great thinker ever lived and taught you 
All the wonder that his soul received; 

No true painter ever set on canvas 
All the glorious vision he conceived. 

We, in all our noblest efforts to be kind 
and patient, sincere and honest, good and 
true, are continually falling short of our 
highest ideals. These shortcomings, these 
failures, this incompleteness, and the fact 
that owing to our limitations we are never 
fully satisfied here, show that we are 
eventually to find complete satisfaction in 
God and in a future life that is uncir- 
cumscribed. 

We also find that man is possessed of 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 247 

a conscience, and that conscience stands 
for righteousness. Therefore there must be 
some righteous Cause, of which such con- 
science, protesting for righteousness, is the 
effect. If conscience is the voice of God 
in man, telUng him that he ought to do 
what his judgment prompts him is right, 
then the conclusion is simply overwhelming 
that there must be back of the voice a 
holy and a righteous personal God, who 
thus speaks in and through man. No 
conviction lays hold of us with such force 
as the power of conscience. What Kant 
called "the moral imperative" asserts its 
sway over the human mind and heart. The 
ear would not hear if there were no atmos- 
phere. The eye could not see if there were 
no light. So the soul would not tremble 
under its obligation if there were no God. 

But men in our time are not content 
to take the position of the Bible and to 
assume the existence of a God without 
attempting to prove it. They must argue 
him in or out of the universe. The battle 
of theism has been a long and a fierce one. 
But there is no question but that on the 



248 SIX FOOLS 

field of argument theism has won the 
fight. 

Yet it is only fair to say that the form 
of the theistic argument has changed with 
the passing of the years. We do not now 
place the emphasis upon the argument 
from design, which Paley thought so strong. 
We are most impressed by the moral 
argument. We look not so much to the 
world without as to the life within for the 
evidence of the living God. We are sure 
of some things. We know there is life, 
for we live. We know there is thought, 
for we think. We know there is a God, 
for we yearn and long for the help of a 
higher power than human power. We 
know that God is because there is im- 
planted within the human soul the desire 
to worship him. 

We find in nature no organic instinct 
ever given without its proper environment. 
The cushioned foot of the camel has the 
desert sands. The fin of the fish is en- 
vironed by water, the wing of the bird 
by the air, the migrating instinct by 
climate, the ear by sound, and the eye 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 249 

by light. So we are driven by logical 
necessity to the belief that this great thirst 
that has been placed within every human 
soul for the living God is one of the strong- 
est evidences that God is, and that he is 
the rewarder of them that diligently seek 
him. Just as the vine mounts continually 
upward, because it is in love with the 
light and desires to greet the light, so 
human souls everywhere reach out after 
God, "if haply they might feel after him, 
and find him, though he be not far from 
every one of us: for in him we live, and 
move, and have our being." 

When the dove flew forth from Noah's 
hand out of the window of the ark, and 
then after flying hither and thither over 
the vast expanse of waters, unable to 
find any resting place, flew back to the 
hand that had let it go, it gives to us a 
picture of the soul seeking earthly pleasures, 
and yet always driven back to God, who 
alone can satisfy. Abraham was not satis- 
fied with the things of earth, for he was 
constantly looking forward to his final 
entrance into that "city which hath foun- 



250 



SIX FOOLS 



dations, whose builder and maker is God." 
Moses was not satisfied, for he esteemed 
"the reproach of Christ greater riches 
than the treasures in Egypt. He had 
respect unto the recompense of the reward. 
He endured as seeing him who is invisible." 
David was not satisfied, although he had 
many things to cause him to rejoice. He 
lived in a palace, surrounded by luxury 
and possessing everything that the heart 
could desire upon the material side. Yet 
in the midst of his palatial and luxurious 
surroundings he longed for a sense of the 
Divine Presence: "My soul thirsteth for 
God, for the living God." 

Man comes to his best life only in pro- 
portion as he recognizes the presence and 
authority of an almighty and beneficent 
God. He comes to his noblest self only 
when he believes in a God from whom he 
may learn his duty. He finds peace of 
mind and heart only as he believes in a 
God to whom his love can go out with 
strong yearning and in whom his troubled 
and despondent soul may find satisfaction. 
God and man belong to each other, and 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 251 

the soul will never find rest until it finds 
rest in him. 

Men like George John Romanes, who 
during his day was a most prominent 
figure among English scientists and the 
highly esteemed personal friend of Charles 
Darwin, have by the formal processes of 
their own subjective logic been brought to 
renounce agnosticism and to make an 
enthusiastic and personal acceptance of the 
faith of Christianity. Many of this class, 
who have made science the ultimate appeal 
in all rational inquiry, and have left no 
basis or sphere for religion, have not been 
able to rid themselves of the ineradicable 
longing and thirsting for God. They have 
found that the heart has fundamental 
premises which are valid even if reason 
cannot fathom their meaning. They have 
perceived that logical processes are not 
the only means of research in regions 
transcendental. They have ascertained that 
reason is not the only attribute of man, 
nor is it the only faculty which he habit- 
ually employs for the ascertainment of 
truth. They have discovered that moral 



252 



SIX FOOLS 



and spiritual faculties are of no less im- 
portance in their respective spheres, even 
in dealing with the problems of every- 
day life. 

If we believe in God, we must believe 
in the divine Fatherhood. Among the 
large number of references that are made 
to the Supreme Being in the Old Testa- 
ment he is mentioned just seven times as 
Father. Five times he is referred to as 
the Father of the Hebrew people. Once 
the promise came to David that God 
would be a Father to his son, Solomon; 
and once the prophecy was made that in 
the future men would pray to God as 
their Father, a prediction that was fulfilled 
in the Sermon on the Mount, when Christ 
taught men to say, "Our Father." In 
the Old Testament there is no record of 
any prayer in which God is addressed as 
Father. We have the recorded words of 
several prayers in which the holy men of 
God called upon him by those names by 
which they best knew him, but there is 
not a single one in which they call upon 
him as Father. They had always known 



! 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 258 

him as the Eternal, the Creator, the Cap- 
tain of the armies of heaven, the Judge, 
the Lord of Hosts, the Self-Existent One, 
the Supreme Ruler. But this conception 
of God as the Father in heaven was very 
far removed from the thoughts of the 
patriarchs and of the multitudes to whom 
was addressed the Sermon on the Mount. 

The New Testament is the only real 
text book upon the Fatherhood of God that 
has ever been given to the world. Christ 
was the first and the greatest teacher of 
this doctrine, and he so wove his own 
personality into, its teaching that he made 
men believe it and love it, feel it and live 
by it. Christ taught this doctrine re- 
peatedly, and in his preaching it was a 
constantly recurring topic. The expres- 
sions: "The Father," "Our Father," "My 
Father," "Your Father," occur nearly one 
hundred times within the four Gospels. 
During the three years of Christ's earthly 
ministry he no doubt gave utterance to 
the thought that God is our Father more 
times than it had appeared in all the 
uninspired literature of all nations since 



254 



SIX FOOLS 



the world began. Because some grains of 
gold have been found here and there in 
nearly all our Western States they are 
not therefore spoken of as gold-bearing 
States in the sense in which California 
and Alaska are spoken of as gold-bearing 
States. Some few grains of this teaching 
of the Fatherhood of God may be found 
here and there scattered throughout all the 
world's literature that was produced up 
to the time of Christ. But the super- 
abundance of the teaching in the New 
Testament is such, as found in the words 
of Jesus, as to give to him the preeminent 
title as the greatest teacher of this doctrine. 
Christ taught that God is our Father; 
that he upholds us in the hands of his 
loving providence; that he pardons our 
offenses, having borne in his own heart, by 
the death of his Son, the burden of our guilt; 
that he perfects our natures and rounds out 
our characters into symmetry and beauty 
by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; and 
that he will at last bring us to the heavenly 
home, where our joy will be made complete 
and perfect, because of his presence. 



1 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 255 

How wonderfully that promise of Jesus 
clarifies our views of God! — "In my Fa- 
ther's house are many mansions." He 
here shows that God is our Father, that 
he has a home, that that home is vast, 
embracing many mansions. There are 
some men who seek by vague definitions 
and by unmeaning terms to put God just 
as far away from the reach of humanity 
as possible. They call him "the Unknow- 
able," "the Absolute," "the Independent," 
"the Power not ourselves that works for 
righteousness," "the Infinite Geometrician," 
"the Universal Force." But Jesus does 
not do any such thing as that. He teaches 
that God has a conscious existence and is 
therefore a substantial, an existing Per- 
sonality. 

The best religious thought of our day 
seeks to interpret God in the light of his 
Fatherhood. We have had in philosophy 
and in theology almost endless speculation 
about the nature of God. The successive 
ages have viewed him in different lights. 
Our fathers looked upon him as a world 
ruler. His kingship, greatness, power, and 



256 SIX FOOLS 

majesty stood at the front. His will was 
everything; men were little or nothing. 
Then came the idea of God as governor, 
conceived under the form of a hmnan 
executive, and who must be just and holy 
as any ideal governor has to be. Theol- 
ogy under this teaching became cold, for- 
mal, and official, and the atonement, the 
richest doctrine of the Christian faith, 
became dominated by the forensic element. 
But our generation has a far deeper and 
truer thought of God. God is not a being 
sitting apart from the universe and watch- 
ing it as he might watch some immense 
clock of infinite proportions which he had 
wound up and left to run down. God is 
immanent and active, purposing, overruling, 
guiding and working in human affairs. 
We no longer hold to that old mediaeval 
conception of a transcendent God, who is 
located apart from the world, as an on- 
looker at its struggles, and only occasionally 
interfering by superhuman portents and 
prodigies. Science and faith now both 
unite in the belief in an immanent God, 
who is everywhere present in nature and 



THE ISrO-GOD FOOL 257 

in grace, who reveals to men his glorious 
purposes, and who asks that they shall be 
workers together with him in the work of 
the world's redemption. We no longer hold 
to the thought of a far-away God, with 
whom we have only legalistic and formal 
relations in his government over us, but 
we believe in God as the One "in whom 
we live, and move, and have our being." 

The agnostic holds to the position that 
he will not believe anything unless it is 
something that he himself has seen, and 
that he will not accept anything unless it 
is something that he has experienced or of 
which he has been personally cognizant. 
Yet competent testimony is a well-estab- 
lished source of knowledge. The most of 
all that we know is based upon testimony. 
All that we apprehend of the past history 
of other races and of other ages is thus 
derived. All that we learn of the places, 
the cities, and the countries of the world, 
except those we have visited, comes from 
the same source. All the legal business of 
all lands and nearly all the business which 
men prosecute daily rest also upon the 



258 SIX FOOLS 

same foundation. Can you conceive of 
a more ridiculous position than that of 
anyone who should declare, "I will not 
believe anything unless it is something I 
myself have seen, nor will I accept any- 
thing unless it is something I have expe- 
rienced or of which I have been personally 
cognizant"? If all should take that posi- 
tion, the wheels of the world's commerce 
would be blocked, trade would be paralyzed, 
all confidence between man and man would 
be destroyed, and the bonds that hold 
society together would be shattered into 
fragments. The modern agnostic professes 
to be a very keen logician. He delights 
in dwelling upon the sophisms, the de- 
fective reasoning, and the changing views 
of different systems of belief as proving 
that there is no basis of certainty for any- 
thing. He enjoys putting up one system 
against another and then showing how the 
one destroys the other. He is continually 
pointing us to the dark segments of the 
sphere of knowledge, and declaring that w^e 
are certain of only one thing — namely, that 
we do not know anything with certainty. 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 259 

Ask the modern agnostic, "Is there a God?" 
and he answers, "We know nothing about 
it." "Has man a soul? Is this soul im- 
mortal? Is there a future life? Is there 
a place of reward and punishment? Is man 
an accountable being before a higher tri- 
bunal than this world?" And he answers, 
"All these things are unknown and un- 
knowable." 

The pantheist affirms that the universe, 
the all, is God. But if God is our Father, 
he is surely a conscious Person. He under- 
stands, he knows, he loves, he feels and 
wills and thinks. These qualities can be 
affirmed only of a conscious person, of a 
God who is our Father. Renan in one of 
his pantheistic books written many years 
ago uses this expression, "Our Father the 
Abyss." That man must regard himself 
as of no more value than the inanimate 
rock, than insensate matter, who regards 
that Power "in whom we live, and move, 
and have our being," as only a blind, 
unyielding impersonal force. That man 
must indeed feel himself to be an orphan, 
who above and beneath and beyond, 



260 SIX FOOLS 

amid all environment, can find no father 
but an Abyss — bottomless, boundless, sight- 
less, thoughtless. But there is just one 
word in Christ's Sermon on the Mount 
that at once dissipates all atheistic, agnos- 
tic, pantheistic and materialistic fogs, and 
that word is "Father." 

The right and truthful conception of the 
divine character must form the foundation 
of true faith. "Without faith it is im- 
possible to please him: for he that cometh 
to God must believe that he is, and that 
he is a rewarder of them that diligently 
seek him." Yet we cannot have faith in 
a Being whom we cannot love. The com- 
mand is: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart, and with all thy 
soul, and with all thy mind, and with all 
thy strength." But it is presupposed in 
the giving of this command, that God is 
a being who is in every way worthy of all 
our love. If God be an unjust, an unkind, 
a cruel and revengeful despot, then (I say 
it reverently) even the command to love 
him does not make it right to love him. 
The righteousness of loving God does not 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 261 

consist merely in obedience to an outward, 
an external command to love him, but it 
consists in that instantaneous and abiding 
recognition within oursel\5es of those lov- 
able qualities of character that we may 
find in him as "the chief est among ten 
thousand, and the one altogether lovely." 
So, then, if the Christian religion is to win 
men everywhere to love God, it must 
present God as a Being who is in every 
way worthy of such love. 

The ancients separated their gods from 
man, sometimes fancying them to be on 
the raging ocean, sometimes in the forests, 
sometimes on the mountain tops, some- 
times in the clouds. But they dwelt far 
away from man, so that when they were 
wanted they could never be found. If 
any man would receive favor from them, 
they must be propitiated, conciliated, and 
cajoled by many sacrifices and offerings. 
But it is the glory of our blessed Chris- 
tianity that God comes here to us. "The 
Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." 
After Christ had entered upon the work of 
his public ministry, at his command diseases 



262 SIX FOOLS 

fled. The deaf heard, the bhnd saw; the 
lame walked; lepers were cleansed. Devils 
departed from the bodies of those whom 
they had possessed; the dead rose up from 
their graves; the chainless winds were 
hushed, and the angry waves grew calm. 
Heaven, earth, and hell were alike subject 
to his omnipotent control. As the great 
Teacher he was never weary of receiving 
any who were willing to receive him. As 
a worker of miracles he was ever perform- 
ing deeds of compassion for the poor, the 
afflicted, and the helpless. As the Lamb of 
God that taketh away the sin of the world 
he suffered upon the cross, the just for the 
unjust, praying for his murderers: "Father, 
forgive them; for they know not what 
they do." This same Jesus is our God, 
for his name is "Emmanuel, God with us." 
"He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father." 

That God who has been represented as 
being in partnership with men for breaking 
bones and sinews upon the barbarous rack 
of torture and burning heretics at the 
stake; that God who has been portrayed 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 263 

as taking delight in human suffering and 
misery; that God who has been depicted 
as taking far more pleasure in the punish- 
ment of the wicked than in the deeds of 
the righteous; that God, be it ever remem- 
bered, is not the God who reigns in the 
heavens. He is not the God of the Bible. 
He is not the God of true Christianity. 
He is not the God who has been revealed 
in the person of Jesus Christ. That God 
is a horrible myth. That God is a vile 
creation, that has sprung from the fanatical 
imaginations of bigoted men. That God, 
or, rather, that base, that false and ig- 
noble idea of God, never has been worthy 
of the love of man. "The Lord is mer- 
ciful and gracious, slow to anger and 
plenteous in mercy. He will not always 
chide: neither will he keep his anger for- 
ever: he hath not dealt with us after our 
sins; n'or rewarded us according to .our 
iniquities. For as the heaven is high above 
the earth, so great is his mercy toward 
them that fear him. As far as the east 
is from the west, so far hath he removed 
our transgressions from us." "God sent 



264 SIX FOOLS 

not his son into the world to condemn the 
world; but that the world through him 
might be saved." 

When you are wearied out with the 
work and the battle of this laborious life, 
and are longing for home and rest and 
love; when you are saddened by losses and 
bereavements, and are longing for that 
consolation and sympathy which the world 
cannot give you; when you find that 
temptation is becoming too strong for you, 
and you cry out with Paul: "O wretched 
man that I am! who shall deliver me from 
the body of this death?" — ^Ah! then re- 
member that God is thy Father, and that 
**like as a father pitieth his children, so 
the Lord pitieth them that fear him; for 
he knoweth our frame, he remembereth 
that we are dust." Our Father! blessed 
relationship! That Christ should appro- 
priate such language as this for himself 
does not seem strange to us. But that 
he should instruct us to take such words 
upon our own sinful lips may well lead 
us to exclaim, "Behold, what manner 
of love the Father hath bestowed upon 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 265 

us, that we should be called the sons of 
God." 

If we believe in God, we must believe 
in the universal human brotherhood. Christ 
came to proclaim the common brotherhood 
of all races and classes of men, by reveal- 
ing God as our Father. He showed him- 
self to be the friend of publicans and 
sinners. He manifested equal sympathy 
for the slave in chains, the beggar by the 
wayside, the prince in the palace, and the 
ruler on the throne. The whole bearing 
and spirit of his life proclaimed this great 
divine principle of the human brother- 
hood. We may find in this grand prin- 
ciple of the essential equality of man, and 
his individual responsibility to a heavenly 
Father, some of the germ principles of the 
world's greatest reforms, some of which 
have already been achieved and many 
others to be accomplished in the years to 
come. It was this dual principle of father- 
hood and brotherhood taught by Christ 
that inaugurated the mightiest social and 
moral revolution that the world has ever 
known: "One is your teacher, and all ye 



266 SIX FOOLS 

are brethren. One is your Father even 
the heavenly. One is your guide even the 
Christ." The world has been a long time 
in learning the great lesson of the uni- 
versal human brotherhood as taught by 
the Christ. When that lesson is fully 
learned a large majority of the much dis- 
cussed questions between capital and labor 
will be forever settled, for then we shall 
be under the sway of obedience to the 
Golden Rule. 

The English barons at Runnymede were 
inspired by the claims for essential equality 
and for the rights of the individual con- 
science when they wrested from despotic 
King John the Magna Charta, which is 
the foundation of all Anglican liberty to- 
day. The keynote of the Magna Charta 
is sounded in that declaration, which lay 
at the very basis of it: "No freeman shall 
be seized, or imprisoned or dispossessed, or 
outlawed, or in any way brought to ruin. 
To no man will we sell or delay or deny 
justice or right." 

Wickliffe, the bright morning star of 
the Reformation, threw back the strong 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 267 

light of a most vigorous life upon the path- 
way that led his followers to the more 
perfect day. He was a true Protestant, 
for he protested with all the might of his 
great soul that every man has the right 
to examine the Bible for himself, that no 
man has the right to make another's con- 
science his slave. 

When Luther nailed his theses to those 
cathedral doors at Wittenberg every blow 
that Luther struck with his hammer was 
a blow for the rights of the individual 
conscience. 

Our own forefathers, the signers of the 
Declaration of Independence, caught the 
spirit of Magna Charta, the spirit of 
Wicklijffe, the spirit of Luther, the spirit 
of Christ, when they said, '*We hold these 
truths to be self-evident, that all men are 
created equal, that they are endowed by 
their Creator with certain inalienable rights; 
that among these are life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness." 

When men learn that they all belong to 
a great brotherhood it will make them 
literal philanthropists, lovers of men. When 



268 SIX FOOLS 

they learn that Jesus Christ by the grace 
of God hath tasted death for every man 
that knowledge will tend to change haughty 
Levites into good Samaritans. When they 
recognize the full force of the "As my 
Father hath sent me, even so send I you," 
that will increase our missionary funds, our 
church building funds, our college and 
hospital endowment funds, a hundred fold. 
The Macedonian call, "Come over and 
help us," is coming from all those who are 
in degradation and in darkness. All these 
are our brothers, whether the skin be 
black or brown or red or yellow or white; 
all, whether they be ignorant or educated, 
wicked in conduct or righteous in character. 
They are all our brothers, and as brethren 
may we learn to "bear one another's bur- 
dens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." He 
who discerns the signs of the times cannot 
fail to discover that all things are tending 
toward establishing the claims of the uni- 
versal human brotherhood. May that time 
be as near at hand as it seems to be when 
the clash of arms in warfare and in carnage 
shall be heard no more. 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 269 

When the war-drums throb no longer, 
And the battle-flags are furled; 

In the Parliament of men, 
The federation of the world. 

The watchword of the gospel of Christ is 
a fraternity as broad as humanity. When 
men learn to feel these ties and claims of 
the universal, human brotherhood, the 
South Sea islander and the Hottentot, 
Negro and Indian, will rise into the dig- 
nity of men who are our brothers. The 
poor man engaged in his struggle for his 
daily bread, the bootblack, the chimney 
sweep, the newsboy, all engaged in daily 
toil, may be comforted and elevated by 
the thought that they are the children of 
the same common Father with us all. 

If we believe in God, we must believe 
in a future life. The belief in a future 
life is a God-given principle, that is innate 
within every human breast. Man in every 
condition of society, both civilized and 
savage, has universally believed in a future 
life. The deep yearnings of the human 
heart in all ages declare this belief in a 
future life. Therefore this omnipresent, un- 



270 SIX FOOLS 

deniable, indestructible, ineradicable fact 
must prove to us that this is God's own 
affirmative answer given everywhere to 
man's question: "If a man die, shall he 
live again?" 

Is it reasonable to suppose that God, 
who knows so well this innate yearning 
for immortality, which he himself has 
formed and has, placed within every human 
breast, should fan this yearning until it 
becomes a perfect flame of desire, and then 
at death cruelly rob us of everything that 
is dearest to us? You could not imagine 
any human father who was sane who 
would create within the eager heart of his 
own little child some fond desire and then 
nourish and feed that intense longing for 
some coming great boon, to which the 
child is led to look forward with the great- 
est hope and expectancy of realization, and 
then at last be brought to the most bitter, 
the most crushing disappointment. Such 
a parent would be an inhuman monster 
who would not deserve the name of father. 
And yet that is just the position taken by 
those who deny the palpable connection 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 271 

between this innate, universal yearning for 
a future life and the omnipotent, loving 
Father, who has placed this unquenchable 
longing within every human breast, and 
who purposes to satisfy this inherent de- 
sire with a glad and triumphant fulfill- 
ment. We deny totally the righteousness 
of God if we say that he has created within 
us the desire for immortality and then 
cheats and deceives us by destroying us. 
Belief in God and in the future life go 
together; they are inseparable. If we be- 
lieve in God, we must believe in a fu- 
ture life. 

If we admit the fact that there is a 
divine government, we acknowledge with 
that very admission that there is a future 
life, for a future life is necessary in the 
plans of a divine government for the 
righting of wrongs, for securing equity and 
justice for those who have never had them 
in this life. If joy and sorrow, pain and 
pleasure, gratification and wretchedness, as 
experienced in this life, are the only re- 
wards and punishments, then their dis- 
tribution is such as to outrage man's sense 



272 



SIX FOOLS 



of justice. If the moral government of 
God is limited to this life only, then it is 
most unjust. If God is just and wise and 
good, as we all believe him to be, all wrongs 
will some day be righted. All will receive 
their just deserts of reward and punishment, 
which they have failed to receive here, 
and justice will some day be done to those 
who have suffered great injustice here. 
Thus there comes to everyone the demand 
for a future, where there shall be a * 'remedy 
for every wrong, a satisfaction for every 
soul"; where the ideal of justice shall be 
revealed in which the good shall receive 
the reward of the good, and the wicked 
the reward of the wicked; where all the 
maladjustments and incongruities of this 
life shall be made forever right. Belief 
in a divine government and in a future 
life go together; they are inseparable. If 
we believe in a divine government, we 
must believe in a future life. 

The princely, the magnificent endow- 
ment of man's mental and moral nature 
shows that the problem of life cannot be 
solved without immortality. Man's insa- 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 273 

liable thirst for knowledge is here never 
fully satisfied. His capacity for loving and 
being loved cannot be circumscribed by the 
narrow limitations of this brief present life. 
These facts, that are inwrought within us 
all, show that immortality alone can sat- 
isfy the value of the unknown quantity in 
the equation of life. God, our Creator, 
nowhere else in this wide world has made 
such a miscalculation in the relation be- 
tween the given energy and the work to 
be accomplished by that energy as would 
be at once manifest in case death means 
final extinction. God everywhere recog- 
nizes the economy of forces, and he would 
not have given to man such a magnificent 
endowment of mental and moral qualities 
if they were only for exercise and use 
during this little earthly life. God has 
not made man like the skyrocket, that 
climbs so quickly to its zenith, flames out 
its beauties for one brief moment, and then 
is swallowed up in the inclosing darkness. 
He has shown to us clearly the principle 
of an orderly and masterly administration 
everywhere in the realm of material things. 



274 SIX FOOLS 

and he has manifested the same principle 
in the creation and endowment of man. 
He has not so blundered in his adjustments 
as to equip man with a wealth of intel- 
lectual activity suflficient for the ages of 
ages, and then decreed that he should have 
no use for his princely endowments after 
the brief span of the earthly life is over. 
Why was man so richly endowed, if all 
that he has and all that he now is, is to 
come to naught? Why all this waste of 
such splendid mental and moral powers? 
If man, with all the God-given powers with 
which he has been endowed, be mortal and 
perishable; if he is to sink at the coming 
of death into annihilation, then he is only 
an utter waste of creative energy. 

There are bonds of human love that 
link us to a future life in a chain which 
cannot be broken. Are these cries from the 
fountain of unsatisfied love, a love which 
is conscious of a power for growing and 
enlarging throughout future endless years, 
always to be answered only by the empty 
echoes of our own cries? Are these sacred 
friendships and holiest affections harshly 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 275 

severed by death, when those holding them 
have only just begun to feel the sweet 
ecstasy of loving and being loved, to re- 
main forever broken and sundered? Are 
the yearnings of our hearts to rejoin our 
loved and lost to remain forever unre- 
quited? Reason gives to these questions 
the overwhelming negative. Love feels 
that it has an undying fervor and intensity 
that go beyond the "earth to earth, ashes 
to ashes, and dust to dust." Love is 
assured that the passion of the heart sur- 
vives all the onslaughts of materialism. 
Love believes 

Since He who knows our need is just — 
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. 

What is excellent 

As God lives, is permanent; 

Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; 

Hearts* loves will meet thee again. 

We cannot believe in the justice and the 
goodness of God if we believe that the 
grave is the end of all. We cannot believe 
in the Fatherhood of God if we deny im- 
mortality to man. 



276 SIX FOOLS 

The revelation of nature furnislies still 
farther evidence in the light of conscience. 
It has already been noticed that the voice 
of conscience in man, which speaks for 
righteousness, must point with unerring 
finger to an omnipotent righteous Person- 
ality back of the voice that thus speaks. 
If conscience thus goes to prove the exist- 
ence of a God, it is equally conclusive in 
establishing the fact of immortality. The 
deepest organic instincts of conscience have 
in all nations and in all ages predicted 
rewards and punishments after death. 
Shakespeare recognized that in the presence 
of death "conscience makes cowards of us 
all" and that "the dread of something after 
death makes us rather bear those ills we 
have than fly to others that we know not 
of." This prophetic instinct in conscience 
is not the result of education, but it be- 
longs to the original structure of human 
nature. It must be that it points to 
reality, or else, as Joseph Cook has said, 
"Conscience itself is an organized lie." 
It has already been observed that in the 
revelation of nature no organic instinct is 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 277 

ever given without its proper environment. 
So the existence of these omnipresent, un- 
deniable, unquestionable instincts of con- 
science in normal human nature, leads us 
to anticipate rewards and punishments after 
death. Therefore the inevitable conclusion 
is that death does not end all, because we 
cannot be rewarded and punished where 
we do not personally exist. Sir Oliver 
Lodge, president of the British Association 
for the Advancement of Science, in his 
famous address before that body at Bir- 
mingham upon the subject of "Continuity," 
asserted his belief in the persistence of 
personality after bodily death, and rebuked 
the negative scientific spirit of the age, 
which tends to deny the existence of any- 
thing which makes no appeal to the organs 
of sense. He asserted that unitary con- 
ception of the universe, which naturally 
leads the thought to God, and announced 
his conviction of continuing life after death 
founded on scientific research. 

The doctrine of a future life is nowhere 
formally asserted in the Old Testament, 
yet it is clearly taught in many instances 



278 SIX FOOLS 

by implication, just as the doctrine of the 
belief in the existence of a God is nowhere 
formally declared in the Old Testament, 
it being everywhere assumed and implied 
without formal statement. Many of the 
earliest patriarchs have left upon record 
clear and explicit testimonies as to this 
belief in a future life. They all confessed 
that they were strangers and pilgrims upon 
earth, declaring plainly that they sought 
another country, that is, a heavenly. The 
psalmist believed it when he said, "As for 
me, I will behold thy face in righteousness; 
I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with 
thy likeness." Isaiah was assured of it 
when he aflfirmed, "Thy dead men shall live, 
together with my dead body shall they 
arise." David was fully persuaded of the 
reality of a future life when he declared 
concerning the child that had been taken 
from him by death, "I shall go to him, but 
he shall not return to me." The Old 
Testament everywhere implies this doctrine 
of a future life because it clearly teaches 
that man possesses a spiritual nature which 
allies him to another and a higher sphere, 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 279 

and which points irresistibly to a con- 
tinuance of the Hfe of the spirit in a heav- 
enly realm. The sixteenth Psalm, for 
example, abounds throughout with expres- 
sions of trust in God, and love for the 
One who is always at our right hand and 
who protects and keeps us. The psalmist 
breaks out in glad confidence: "Therefore 
my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth; 
my flesh also shall rest in hope. Thou 
wilt show me the path of life; in thy pres- 
ence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand 
there are pleasures forevermore." This is 
one of the few instances in the Old Testa- 
ment in which the heart of the sacred 
writer becomes so full of an abounding 
faith in immortality that it overflows in 
most joyous utterances of hope. The very 
essence of this trust is that the psalmist 
feels that he has partaken of the divine 
nature. Something of the holiness of God 
has been implanted within his breast. 
Therefore God cannot and will not suffer 
him to be annihilated. So this clear teach- 
ing of the Old Testament is that man 
possesses a spiritual nature, an immortal 



280 SIX FOOLS 

spirit that is capable of taking into itself 
the divine nature. He has a capacity for 
holiness that may be filled with the holi- 
ness of God. Such an one comes to feel 
that he is born of God, that he is a child 
of God and an heir of God. He is con- 
vinced, he knows, that he cannot be 
confined in the grave, and that his true 
place is in the heavens with God, of whose 
nature he now partakes, and to whose 
everlasting kingdom he must belong. 

The New Testament gleams with the 
glory and splendor of the light that it 
throws upon this doctrine of a future life. 
Zacharias declared in exultant song before 
the birth of this mightiest of conquerors, 
the conqueror of death, "The day spring 
from on high hath visited us, to give light 
to them that sit in darkness and in the 
shadow of death." The triumphant song 
of the angelic hosts over the plains of 
Bethlehem, "Peace on earth, good will 
toward men," is in the same key. There 
never could be peace on earth without the 
victory over death. Then come the works 
of the Master, lifting dead bodies from 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 281 

their couches into all the fullness of their 
lost health, and calling them back from 
the loathsome corruption of the tomb to 
strength and to life again. Then come the 
words of the Master, most fitting to ac- 
company such mighty works, announcing 
himself to be the resurrection and the life, 
and that whosoever liveth and believeth 
in him should never die; saying that in 
three days he would raise up the temple 
of his body, that he had power to lay 
down his life and to take it again, speaking 
of the many mansions of his Father's house, 
and repeatedly declaring that this life is 
but the beginning of the life that is ever- 
lasting. 

There are no other facts of ancient his- 
tory that are sustained by such an array 
of evidence, external and internal, as the 
facts of the life, death, and the resurrec- 
tion of Christ. Christ based his whole 
mission and ministry upon his resurrection. 
If he did not rise, then he was a falsifier. 
But to a confessedly sinless character this 
was impossible. A falsity could not have 
brought about the wonderful transformation 



282 SIX FOOLS 

in the apostles, who were suddenly changed 
from a condition of the deepest despair 
to that of the utmost courage. The 
apostles had every opportunity for thor- 
oughly satisfying themselves as to the 
truth or the falsity of the resurrection of 
Christ, and they had the most absolute 
faith in the resurrection as a fact. This 
is shown from their placing their hopes 
and their preaching upon the resurrection 
of Christ as a foundation that could not 
be shaken. It is only the fact of the 
resurrection that can account for the mar- 
velous change that took place in the 
spirit and character of the apostles. Fraud 
or fiction could never have brought about 
the mighty moral revolution that was 
wrought in the lives of these men. The 
resurrection completely transformed them. 
It inspired them with a new conception of 
Christ's kingdom as for all people, and 
filled them with a zeal and enthusiasm 
which could know no limits as they engaged 
in work for Christ. 

When Peter, only a few months after 
Christ's resurrection, made his masterly de- 



THE NO-GOD FOOL 283 

fense before the Sanhedrin, it was grounded 
upon the great fact of a risen Christ. 
How utterly Peter's argument would have 
been demolished if the Sanhedrin could 
have produced the dead body of Christ! 
They did not dare try to produce it, and 
they did not dare so much as to suggest a 
doubt of the resurrection of Christ. Paul's 
First Epistle to the Corinthians, which 
contains that remarkable argument on the 
resurrection in the fifteenth chapter, was 
written within twenty-seven years of the 
actual resurrection, and Paul fearlessly ap- 
peals to more than two hundred and fifty 
yet living witnesses of the fact. 

"Jesus and the resurrection" was the one 
theme that the apostles everywhere pro- 
claimed. It was the creed by which they 
lived and the one by which they were most 
glad and willing to die. For them "to 
live was Christ, to die was gain." Stephen 
went home rejoicing. Paul hailed the day 
of his departure with the greatest joy. 
Peter looked forward with the utmost 
eagerness to his coming day of deliverance. 
John said, with that spirit of confidence 



284 SIX FOOLS 

born of absolute certainty: "We know that 
when he shall appear, we shall be like him; 
for we shall see him as he is." The stu- 
pendous change of the Sabbath day from 
the seventh to the first day of the week 
is a perpetual memorial of the resurrection. 
The very existence of the Christian Church 
proves it, for the resurrection was the 
corner stone of the apostolic teaching and 
preaching. The resurrection of Christ is 
not only a proof of the truth of Chris- 
tianity, but it is a proof of our own immor- 
tality. Materialism affirms that death is 
a wall; the resurrection clearly shows that 
it is a door into a larger life. Jesus entered 
into death, passed through it triumphantly, 
and emerged on the other side in glorious 
life. Because he lives we shall live also. 
We have a li\'ing church because we have 
a living Christ. The works that have 
been wrought by Christ and by a living 
Christianity in this world ever since his 
resurrection are a proof that he who has 
thus wrought and who is now working these 
wonders is a risen and a regnant Christ. 



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